Upcoming seminars

All seminars will take place between 1.15pm and 2.05pm unless otherwise stated.

If you want to attend any of our seminars, please arrive at the location 5 to 10 minutes before the start time. You do not need to book your place to attend.

Professor Jennifer Piscopo (Royal Holloway)

• Title: She’s 'Too Ambitious': Does Running for the US Presidency Penalize Women in Politics?
• Speaker: Professor Jennifer Piscopo, Royal Holloway
• Date: 10 February 2026
• Location: 1 West, Room 2.104

About this seminar

During this seminar, Professor Jennifer Piscopo will discuss the following research:

The mega-election year of 2024 featured 31 direct presidential elections, with women winning just five contests—and only in two instances where the president is the sole or more powerful chief executive. This pattern persists even as public opinion shows increasing voter support for women leaders. Yet does this support persist once women express presidential ambition?

In the US case, defeated presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris received high approval ratings while serving in Congress, yet faced relentless criticism when seeking the presidency. Both were called “too ambitious.” We use survey experiments to explore the existence of a presidential ambition penalty for white and non-white women.

Our first study varies whether a woman is holding office or holding office with the intent to seek the presidency compared to a similarly-situated man, and our second study compares a white woman to a non-white woman in the same conditions. We expect that women face an ambition penalty relative to men; that this penalty is sharper for non-white women than white women; and that this penalty constitutes an additional racialized, gendered stereotype that women candidates must overcome if they are to shatter the United States’ highest glass ceiling. The existence of an ambition penalty could explain the relative dearth and lack of success of women presidential candidates.

Dr Jac Larner (Cardiff University)

Information for this seminar will be published soon.

Professor Paul Higate (University of Bath)

• Title: Outsourcing Genocide: A Critical Analysis of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the evolving logics of Settler Colonialism
• Speaker: Professor Paul Higate, University of Bath
• Date: 24 February 2026
• Location: 1 West, Room 2.104

About this seminar

During this seminar, Professor Paul Higate will discuss the following research:

This paper interrogates the role of neo-liberal, outsourced humanitarian infrastructure in the evolving logics of settler colonialism in Gaza. While the Israeli state’s campaign in Gaza has involved extreme, often disproportionate military and economic measures, recent developments include the use of humanitarian mechanisms as instruments of indirect and direct violence involving both Private Military and Security contractors and the Israeli Defence Force.

With over 75,000 reported Palestinian deaths and more than 177,000 injured since September 2023, mechanisms such as controlled aid distributions and the implementation of starvation as a weapon of war have attracted international concern. In early 2025, the US-registered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, facilitated by Israeli authorities and operated in part by American PMSC contractors, was launched ostensibly to provide aid. However, recent evidence indicates that contractors have utilised disproportionate force, including lethal violence, against Palestinians seeking aid—practices racialised and justified through dehumanising rhetoric.

The current paper analyses these incidents as instances of privatised pacification, wherein humanitarian intervention operates as a covert extension of colonial logics. In this case, privatised violence – catalysed through ‘Crusader’ narrative and practice - provides new legal, rhetorical, and operational cover for state brutality, deepening the settler colonial condition by cloaking it in humanitarian discourse.

Dr Stephen Hall (University of Bath)

• Titles: Distorted Learning: Power, Identity, and Political Narratives in Times of Crisis
• Speaker: Dr Stephen Hall, University of Bath
• Date: 3 March 2026
• Location: 1 West, Room 3.107

About this seminar

During this seminar, Dr Stephen Hall will discuss the following research:

My current research program consists of three disparate – but related – strands examining how learning, power, and narratives operate in contemporary politics. First, I analyse distorted learning in elite decision-making, focusing on how cognitive biases shape foreign policy choices and decision-making in autocracies, which invariably affects their learning and adaptability. This strand examines Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine.

A linked aspect of this agenda is investigating Donald Trump’s selective learning from domestic and international examples, showing how misperception and overconfidence contribute to political overreach and persistence. This strand examines different modes of learning including imitation, adaptation, experimentation, and mislearning, and explores how information environments and ideology shape political learning across regime types.

A final link in this learning agenda is investigating the varieties of authoritarian learning in regions outside the post-Soviet space. It forms the basis of a research grant application. A different research agenda focuses on narratives, identity, and cultural politics in contexts of war. This strand analyses Ukrainian football in helping shape identity, computer games used by Russia and Ukraine to promote narratives, and the role of veterans, journalists, and social media influencers in promoting pro-Russian narratives.

Professor Susan Banducci (University of Birmingham)

• Title: Gender Equality Resistance and Political Competition: The Emergence of a Gender Politics Cleavage?
• Speaker: Professor Susan Banducci, University of Birmingham
• Date: 10 March 2026
• Location: 1 West, Room 2.102

About this seminar

During this seminar, Professor Susan Banducci will discuss the following research:

To what extent is political competition shaped by gender politics? Research on political cleavages has shown that new cleavages can emerge but little of this work has focused on gender despite the gender gap in vote choice and policy preferences showing that gender can play an important role in political preferences and mobilisation.

In this study, we look beyond the gender gap to examine how resistance to gender equality - a multi-dimensional measure capturing an individual’s denial of gender inequality, lack of support for gender equality as a societal value, and their resistance to state action to remedy gender inequalities - shapes political choices and party competition. We use data from 28 countries in Round 11 of the European Social Survey that had an extended battery of items measuring gender attitudes that also captures vote choice.

We test three models of vote choice. First, we examine how resistance to gender equality shapes party choice in a binary choice model (e.g. support for Populist Radical Right). Second, we examine how resistance shapes preferences for parties along a scale of party gender equality support (based on VDEM data). Third, we test a directional model of vote choice using an individual’s distance from each party on gender equality.

If gender politics represents an emergent cleavage, as suggested by Sass and Kuhnle (2023), we anticipate resistance to gender equality to increase the likelihood of supporting parties that oppose gender equality, in particular parties on the right, and to structure party preferences across party families. Furthermore, with the comparative cross-national data, we can model the structural features and which types of social and political contexts are more likely to mobilise gender as a political cleavage.

Dr Tobias Muller (University of Cambridge)

Information for this seminar will be published soon.

Dr Bohdana Kurylo (London School of Economics)

• Title: The Iron Road Home: Ukrainian Railways, Resilience, and Ontological Security in War
• Speaker: Dr Bohdana Kurylo, London School of Economics
• Date: 24 March 2026
• Location: 1 West, Room 2.102

About this seminar

During this seminar, Dr Bohdana Kurylo will discuss the following research:

In my talk, I will speak about how Ukraine’s railway system has become a source of ontological security during the full-scale war with Russia. Ontological security here describes the felt confidence that a political community's collective self can endure despite disruption and uncertainty.

My core claim is that Ukraine’s railways have helped sustain that confidence through an interplay of creative practices of resilience and public storytelling. I will discuss the key mechanisms through which this has occurred by drawing on the narrative analysis of a multimodal corpus comprising official communications, railway media and arts, and interviews with workers and passengers. The talk will reimagine the security of being as a process found in the adaptive practice of collective resilience rather than in the restoration of pre war normalcy or fixed identity.

Professor Alison Phipps (York St. John University)

• Title: Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism
• Speaker: Professor Alison Phipps, York St. John University
• Date: 14 April 2026
• Location: 1 West, Room 2.102

About this seminar

During this seminar, Professor Alison Phipps will discuss the following research:

What are the relationships between sexual violence, sexual fear, social control, and surplus value? What is the role of sexual violence as racial capitalist systems corral, mould, use, and discard the workers they require? Sexual violence is key to the enclosure of bodies, and to the extraction of productive and socially reproductive labour. Sexual violence is a technique by which resources are expropriated, and communities and peoples terrorised and dispossessed. Sexual violence is also a pretext for the disposal of unwanted populations through criminal punishment, militarised border regimes, neo-colonial wars, and genocide.

This talk is based on the forthcoming book Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism (Manchester University Press), which brings together assorted case studies including the Early Modern witch hunts, reproductive accumulation in transatlantic slavery, sexual harassment in drop-shipping warehouses and sweatshops, far-right Islamophobia and ‘anti-gender’ activism, the manosphere, and the Gaza genocide. It describes the coloniality of sexual violence, situating both acts of sexual violence and ideas of sexual threat within an analysis of racial capitalist property relations and the split colonial/modern psyche. It also argues that violence is necessary because power is incomplete: from bodily to planetary scales, resistance persists.

Professor Juliet Kaarbo (University of St. Andrews)

• Title: Breaking Bad: Leaders’ Personality Changes and Consequences for Foreign Policies
• Speaker: Professor Juliet Kaarbo, University of St. Andrews
• Date: 21 April 2026
• Location: 1 West, Room 2.102

About this seminar

During this seminar, Professor Juliet Kaarbo will discuss the following research:

How do leaders’ personalities change over time and how do these changes affect governance, policies (including foreign policies) and political outcomes? Professor Kaarbo will present her research focusing on negative developments – e.g., leaders becoming more authoritarian, more distrustful, over-confident.

This project examines two primary questions: What are the main drivers behind ‘bad’ changes in leaders’ personalities and what are the effects of ‘breaking bad’? Building on research on ageing, experience, learning, and power effects, it tracks how leaders change, in undesirable directions, in their personality characteristics, policymaking processes, and decisions. The project is multi-methodological, using text analysis of leaders’ verbal material and case studies built on secondary sources.

Previous seminars

2025

• Ableist or Accessible? A Comparative Analysis of Disability and European Parliaments - Professor Liz Evans, University of Southampton
• A Global New Right? The International of Conservative Intellectuals - Dr Valentin Behr, Institut d'études avancées de Paris
• From Confrontation to Cooperation: How Leaders' Beliefs Shape Enduring Interstate Rivalries - Dr Consuelo Thiers, University of Edinburgh
• What Comparative Area Studies (CAS) Brings to the Table: Leveraging and Integrating Area-Based Knowledge in the Social Sciences - Professor Rudra Sil, University of Pennsylvania
• X Marks the Spot: The Performance of Precise Targeted Killing of Terrorists on Social Media - Dr Chris Fuller, University of Southampton
• Strategic Representation of Women in Radical Right Parties: Evidence from Regional Council Elections in Italy - Rosella Merullo, Universität Hamburg
• Issue Ownership and Niche Parties’ Longevity in Consociations - Dr Timofey Agarin, Queen’s University Belfast

2024

• Desertion and Conscientious Objection in the Context of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine - Dr Dina Bolokan Université de Neuchâtel
• ChatGPT as a tool for reflective assessment - Professor Felia Allum, University of Bath
• Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Latin America - Dr Luis Schenoni, University College London
• Colliding Catastrophes: Climate Change and Online Misinformation - Dr Susannah Crockford, University of Exeter
• Dump her in Anatolia: Violent language in populist discourse - Lucas Scheel, University of Adelaide
• Podcasts for Assessment and Feedback__ - Professor Hilde Coffe, University of Bath
• Linking epistemological and ontological in/security: Hungary's identity crisis, Russian disinformation and Hungarians' vernacular insecurity - Dr Alena Drieschova, University of Cambridge
• Normative Agency of African States in UN Cybernorms Processes - Ndidi Olibamoyo, University of Bath
• Brexit, Facebook, and Transnational Right-Wing Populism - Dr Natalie-Anne Hall, Loughborough University
• The Emergence of Roles in British Foreign Policy: How the UK Interprets Russian Disinformation - Sean Garrett, University of Bath
• Shi'ite Environmental Ethics in a Globalising World: Man and Nature in M.H. Tabatabai's 'Ethics of Moderation' - Dr Bianka Speidl, University of Exeter
• Interpreting EU27-UK Parliamentary Diplomacy - Dr Cherry Miller, University of Glasgow
• Female Empowerment and Extreme Violence against Women - Dr Sara Polo, University of Essex
• The Role of Conflict-Seeking and Conflict-Avoidance in Explaining Gender Gaps in Political Engagement - Dr Rosalind Shorrocks, University of Manchester
• From Ontological Security to Existential Threat: Retracing the Emergence of Contemporary Anti-Technology - Dr Mauro Lubrano, University of Bath
• Meadows and Uplands: Leave’s Vision of the Post-Referendum Good Life - Dr Mike Bolt, University of Bath
• How to Encourage Citizen Empowerment in Behavioural Public Policy - Professor Peter John, King's College London

2023

• Hegel in Italy: How Ideas Became Political Practice - Dr Fernanda Gallo, University of Cambridge
• The UK Voter ID Reform: Effects on Voter Attitudes and Behaviour - Professor Petra Schleiter, University of Oxford
• "Enemies Within/Enemies Without": How Do Emotional and Security-Based Fears of "Infiltration" Direct and Shape Campaigns of Mass Violence? - Dr Leah Owen, Swansea University
• Female Empowerment and Extreme Violence against Women - Dr Sara Polo, University of Essex
• Understanding Territorial Withdrawal: Israeli Occupations and Exits - Dr Robert Geist-Pinfold, Durham University
• Meme-ing Waves: Unpacking Political Narratives in the Romanian Context - Ms Mimi Mihailescu, University of Bath
• The Syrian Conflict in the News: Coverage of the War and the Crisis of US Journalism - Dr Gabriel Huland, University of Bath
• En/Countering the State: Understanding Citizen Agency at the Front Lines of Democratic Government - Professor John Boswell, University of Southampton
• Class, Power, Democratic Socialism: The Politics and Legacy of Aneurin Bevan - Dr Nye Davis, Cardiff University