Director of the Division of Human and Social Sciences Professor David Wilkinson announced the appointment of Dr Iain Mackenzie who steps up into the Head of School role this August saying ‘I am looking forward to working with him over the next year’. And so are we! We asked him to deliver his manifesto here.
‘I am delighted to take on the role as Head of School for Politics and International Relations and look forward to working with our entire School community to deliver our exciting new curriculum. My sincere thanks to my predecessor Dr Nadine Ansorg for her sterling service in steering the School through the pandemic and many other challenges to the point where we can now look ahead secure in the knowledge that we are in the best possible place to provide excellent teaching, learning and support for all our students.
My hope is that, over the next three years, we can find as many ways as possible (within the curriculum, alongside it and in extra-curricula activities too) to enable every student, from the foundation year to our Ph.D. students, to have a series of learning experiences that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
‘There’s (perhaps!) nothing as exciting as learning – and we will bring this excitement and engagement to our work with students in everything we do.’
And to us as staff: we do what we do because we are passionate about the subject. Working together, staff and students alike, in pursuit of understanding, and how to change this wonderful and, yes, frustrating, thing we call the political world is what we love doing!
As the world is ‘boiling’ and wars, actual and metaphorical, rage throughout the world, we will find as many ways as possible to discuss, to debate, to be creative about everything that is at stake. What problems underpin the seemingly endless to-and-fro of opinion? Can we move debates on to more positive and productive grounds where new approaches might emerge and new possibilities bear fruit? It is our role as a School to find ways to bring us all together – not always in big groups, sometimes in small groups of shared interest – to explore, understand and, why not, change the political world.’