Will Allen

We are launching another online Spring Seminar Series, starting two weeks from today.

www.psa.ac.uk/specialist_g...

We have a great programme of four fascinating talks from political psychologists, happening fortnightly on Thursdays at 12:00.

The line-up...

A red double decker bus passes in front of the iconic Big Ben tower which is lit at night. There is a fog that creates a fuzzy glow.

Evening, London

Why does all this matter? Because at the end of the day, I'd like to think we're trying in good faith to relate with the human sides of our colleagues and make the best of an otherwise grim situation. Openness, mentoring, and good evidence should feature in our response: bsky.app/profile/will...

While sharing ECR experiences is important for buildling peer-support and solidarity, it's also important to direct these to funders and mid/senior colleagues who sit on panels and create postdoc posts. Watch @ralphscott.bsky.social and @lawrencemckay.bsky.social for this! bsky.app/profile/ralp...

In a lot of my mentoring and supervising work, managing expectations consistently comes up. For example, among first-gen students and researchers, norms and know-how around publishing (which is key to research careers) aren't always spelled out. I like to do so with data: bsky.app/profile/will...

Great ideas come from many places, too. Finding ways to try and reduce biases related to (mis)perceptions of what names and institutions signal may be a practical way of supporting this goal. The BA is doing this with its Small Grants, and we did it at Migration Studies: bsky.app/profile/will...

Increasing competition across the board means every application, bid, and submission is more consequential yet less likely. But our main trade in ideas still holds: developing meaningful ones and compellingly conveying them is key. This takes practice, time, and mentoring. bsky.app/profile/will...

To mark the 40th anniversary of the @britishacademy.bsky.social's postdoc fellowships, I'm at their SHAPE conference today to discuss academic precarity and what the sector can do to better understand and support early-career researchers. Some unordered thoughts (with past threads linked):

We (@lawrencemckay.bsky.social @williamlallen.bsky.social) have data on this stretching back to 2012 for a forthcoming report on the current academic job market in Politics - and let me just say it's unprecedentedly bad at the moment!

Bumping this amid today’s various threads about the academic job market and supporting early-career researchers.

A deep golden brown cake in a ridged baking tray with paper. Flakes of toasted almonds are scattered randomly across the top.

Torta di pere / pear cake #poliskybakes

No doubt there’s someone out there who has written something far more sophisticated about humaneness in universities and research. I wanted to simply write a little reminder to myself that being a ‘humane’ academic involves recognizing how doing science, and trying to do it better, is deeply human.

Practically, this means I’m thinking more about how to remove barriers for other folks who may not yet have the abilities or power to do so. And on a social-read level, putting in a little more work to explain assumptions about how academic settings run without singling people out. 5/n

Building a more ‘humane’ academic world isn’t particularly novel or requires moralizing about what is already clearly an imperfect system. Rather, for me it’s about showing up with the stance of ‘how can my being here help you figure out and achieve what you want’. 4/n

Sure, in the grand scheme of life changing things, peer reviews or supervisor feedback aren’t super high up there. But they still matter, and potentially massively so for the individuals concerned. Receiving one of vanishingly few grants or an R&R at a decent journal can change a career path. 3/n

It got me thinking about why I reached for that term in the moment. I reckon it was to emphasize how in many of the routine-but-important reviewing and editorial tasks I am doing lately, it’s easy to forget there is a human behind the thing I’m evaluating. Weirdly artificial rubrics don’t help! 2/n

Recently I was giving a talk and offhandedly said something about trying to build a more humane academic world. I got pulled up on the ‘humane’ language: as researchers, we’re (generally) not doing anything immediately consequential for life itself, so isn’t this a bit dramatic? 1/n

Congratulations and well done!

Thanks! I can imagine it’s v revealing. Good food for thought.

#migcitsky #polisky #econsky #psjobs #psjminfo

I wish I got some turkey every time I baked! Also, these look like the prototypical cookie emoji. Well done! 🍪

Sounds fascinating! In your case, what were students writing and writing back against? Am at a stage where I am prepping / experimenting for future courses.

Five white sandwich biscuits arranged in a diagonal row on a dark plate, showing a cross section. A small spoonful of blood orange curd placed next to the biscuits to show the creamy filling.

For this week’s @sotonpolitics.bsky.social seminar, we’ve got alfajores (Latin American cornflour sandwich biscuits) filled with blood orange curd #poliskybakes

Congratulations and what great news all around!

“He’s so cute, I just want to take him [Paddington] home. And it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve taken a South American bear home.” I mean…can’t argue with that, Alan. #baftas

A pink and white flower pokes out of the ground among other small purple buds.

A mound with three bare trees sits among a flooded plain

Spring has arrived in Oxford

A choir and orchestra stand in the centre of an old church with large arches around them. An organ sits above them in the centre.

Wild night out in Oxford, 18th century style

A colourful salad of green rocket, deep pink grapefruit segments, and pale white fennel slices.

Fennel, grapefruit, rocket #poliskycooks

Congratulations Vicente!

Congrats Lorenzo and great to see this out! We need more social scientific engagement with the visual and creative arts, but of course I’d say that 😉