Update on the many Politics In Spires series

The Departments blog Politics in Spires special series Politics inspires Schools is now drawing to a close.

This series was generated by discussions in schools between DPIR post graduates and 16-18 year-old students taking courses in government and politics. The blog posts are a direct response to questions raised by students about relevant DPIR research and include the following video by new Head of Department, Dr Elizabeth Frazer and DPhil student Katharine Millar on ‘Gendered Violence in Conflict’.

We plan to run a follow-up series in Michaelmas term 2014.

Politics in Spires will shortly be hosting two new themed series:

· Constitutional Studies– a joint initiative between the Faculty of Law and the Department of Politics at the University of Oxford whose objectives are to increase the amount of interdisciplinary cooperation between law and political science in the field of constitutional studies and to raise the profile of the academic study of constitutional law and politics.

· Revolutions in the balance– with contributors from across academic disciplines, this blog series seeks to highlight connections between individual countries connected with the 'Arab Spring' to better understand how systemic conditions led to a region-wide wave of revolutions.

If you are interested in the issues surrounding the phenomenon of blogging in academia you might be interested in attending an upcoming DPIR event: 'Academic Blogging: Political Analysis in the Digital Age' on 25 February. Registration is now available here: http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/index.php/event-registration.html