New convenors and call for expressions of interest

Hi everyone!

My name is Ben Farrand (Professor of Law & Emerging Technologies at Newcastle University), and I'm writing on behalf of myself and Dr Mike Bourne, Reader in Politics and International Relations at Queen's University Belfast. We have recently become convenors for the ISET Working Group, and will be responsible for organising ISET's schedule of activities. 

Before going into this in more detail, we wanted to first thank Dr Ciaran Gillespie for all his work running ISET, and for organising what was a very successful set of panels at the BISA Annual Conference. There is a real strength in the membership of ISET, and Mike and I look forward to working with you all to really help to make the working group a centre for research excellence in the intersections between international relations and technologies, broadly defined.

If you check the working group frontpage, and the 'About' page, you will see a slightly updated vision and set of aims for the working group, as well as indicative activities. It's some of these activities in particular that I'm writing this news update to inform you all about.

ISET will now organise fortnightly virtual seminars, allowing for the presentation of work-in-progress by BISA ISET members. It doesn't matter whether you are a PhD student starting to work on your first paper or wanting to demonstrate some of your initial findings, or a well-established researcher in the field wanting to try out a new idea. We would like everyone that is part of this community to feel that ISET is a place where their work in progress can receive critical feedback in a supportive environment. The idea would be that whatever work is ready in draft form would be emailed to Mike and I, and then one of us would act as a discussant after a twenty minute presentation, with the opporunity for the audience to ask questions afterwards. I'm now in the process of organising our events for the first semester of the academic year (i.e. from September until December 2025).

If you would be interested in taking part in this series and presenting your work, please email me with an expression of interest at ben.farrand@newcastle.ac.uk with a title and 200 word abstract (that doesn't need to be remotely polished!). It doesn't matter what aspect of technology you're interested in, what perspective you have, or which methodological approach you take, we want to hear from you. 

There is also going to be an in-person event in Newcastle that is in the process of being organised logistically, and a separate news item will be published about that soon. 

Another opportunity we have is for anyone that would be interested in writing short blog-style articles for the ISET working group page. You might have something interesting you want to say, or a comment on something happening regarding technology that is ISET relevant, but maybe not something that could really be a journal article (yet?). If so, we'd be more than happy to help you get your voice out there by writing short (circa 1,000-2,000 word) pieces, which we would then promote through the network. Again, get in touch by email at ben.farrand@newcastle.ac.uk in the first instance to discuss possible ideas.

With very best wishes, and look forward to working with you all,

Ben (on behalf of Ben and Mike)