FOLLOW members Tasniem Anwar, Esmé Bosma and Pieter Lagerwaard convene an Early Career Workshop at the 13th Pan-European Conference on International Relations at Sofia University “Sveti Kliment Ohridski”.
How can we deal with research dilemmas, challenging methodological questions and what should we include in the writing of our methodology sections, when the research entailed unpredictable and ‘messy’ circumstances?The workshop aims to make these challenging methodological questions visible and up for discussion. We invite participants to share their (personal) research and writing experiences, including those that might not have worked well, and to reflect and discuss which experiences may or may not end up in their written accounts
Please view the final program by clicking on ‘ programme’ on the left
FOLLOW team member Bruno Magalhães convened and organised the Workshop ‘EU-Brazil Cooperation on Migration and Borders‘ at the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES, UvA).
“What makes European policies designed to manage migration and combat transnational crime travel more or less successfully around the world? This workshop uses the example of Europe-Brazil migration and border management cooperation to address this issue. Migration and borders have become key topics for the relation between the European Union, Brazil and other Latin American countries in recent years. On the follow up to the 2018 UN Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees, the EU has elected sound migration management in Latin America a strategic priority. The ‘European Union – Latin America and the Caribbean Structured Dialogue on Migration’ has also recently highlighted data sharing as a priority for cooperation between the regions.”
Tasniem Anwar, Rocco Bellanova and Pieter Lagerwaard presented the Paper ‘Recode We Must. Bringing ambiguity back in’ in the ‘Re-coding Black Mirror’ Workshop at CPDP 2019 ‘Computers and Democracy’ held at Brussels.
“Black Mirror is a British sci-fi series directed by Charlie Brooker portraying a dystopian future emanating from the wide use of digital advancements. Even though Black Mirror’s episodes do not entirely rely on the widespread availability of existing technology, some of the advancements presented are not from such a distant future.
Re-coding Black Mirror aims at creating dialogue and connections between computer, data and social scientists and also activists and privacy advocates that are interested in the societal and ethical implications of digital technologies. In order to address emerging social phenomena from different perspectives, the workshop employs a novel interactive format, where researchers are invited to create futuristic scenarios as the ones depicted in Black Mirror exploring emerging societal and ethical concerns.
It will also be a forum for raising opportunities of networking with scholars from different fields to explore novel research problems that can be relevant to both the web and social science communities.”
Marieke de Goede and all FOLLOW team members and associates presented their current research projects.
FOLLOW team member Pieter Lagerwaard and Natalie Welfens organised the AISSR event ‘What drives you? Personal Motivations in Social Science Research‘.
Panel discussants: Prof. Dr. Marieke de Goede (Political Science), Dr. Thijs Bol (Sociology), Dr. Rachel Spronk (Anthropology) and Prof. Dr. Tom van der Meer (Political Science)
“What drives us to choose certain research topics, methods, and strategies for the dissemination of research results? How does our broader societal and political engagement relate to personal research motivations?
Too often, we tend to discuss these kind of questions through the grammar of the objective/subjective, neutral/biased or along methodological lines. This panel proposes a new angle by thinking about personal motivations across the disciplinary and methodological divides. It will address fundamental questions such as the role of the researcher in data-production, the influence of personal motivations for studying a topic, and the challenges of navigating between societal outreach and impact on the one side, and academic ‘neutrality’ on the other.”
Esmé Bosma participated at the Roundtable ‘Can public/private partnership approaches to fighting financial crime scale-up in Europe?’ organised by the Future of Financial Intelligence Sharing (FFIS) international research programme/The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “The FFIS programme delivers a range of workshops to inform the establishment of public-private financial information-sharing partnerships in key jurisdictions and major financial centres. The workshops convene key policy, law enforcement, regulator, finance and professional sector leaders and research/NGO experts at the national and international level” (website FFIS).
“This roundtable is part of a series of FFIS events convened in jurisdictions that have developed public/private partnership and intelligence-led responsive reporting as part of their AML/CFT system. These roundtables aim to explore the desirability, opportunities and barriers to increase the scale of outputs from public/private financial information-sharing”.
Prof. Marieke de Goede participated in a high level panel on “The Use of International Terrorist Watch Lists”. “This High Level Panel organised by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) brings together four experts to discuss the practical and human rights implications of the requirements contained in these resolutions, as well as known cases related to international criminal justice cooperation, watch lists, and the collection and sharing of information”.
We are delighted to announce our two-day workshop on Translating STS to Security Sites. During the workshop we will discuss how we can redefine and rethink the conceptual terminologies of STS to make them attuned to researching controversies in de-bounded, secretive, and profoundly political security sites. The first day of the workshop (25 June) is open for colleagues and others who are interested to engage in this discussion with us and other scholars who have been engaged in developing and deploying new approaches to thinking about security politics. We are happy to welcome among others, Nisha Shah (University of Ottawa), William Walters (Carleton University), Anna Leander (Copenhagen Business School), Louise Amoore (Durham University). The full program can be found here.
Translating STS to Security Sites is organized by Tasniem Anwar, Dr. Rocco Bellanova and Prof. Marieke de Goede
Prof. Marieke de Goede presented in the panel on Thursday May 31 in the panel on ‘The Ever-Changing Spectre of Sanctions Risks’ to speak about the application of terrorism-related sanctions by EU and US regulatory bodies and their role in restricting the activities of returning foreign fighters. Esmé Bosma took part in two pre-conference workshops on “Executing an Effective Internal AFC [anti-financial crime] Investigation” and on “The Basics of AML [anti-money laundering] Analytics” and attended the conference. See for a detailed programme the link ‘more info’.
FOLLOW team member attended the ‘Flying Money Conference, Investigating illicit financial flows in the city’ co-organised by the Institute of Network Cultures with the city of Amsterdam.
“This European conference had a unique nature and scope. It brought people together from a wide range of backgrounds – civil servants, scientists, engineers, journalists, artists, bankers and entrepreneurs – to discuss topics related to the future of digital money, and illicit financial flows in particular. To address these themes more than 40 speakers were invited, including Bill Browder, Eric Smit, Francesca Bria, Bastian Obermayer, Klaas Knot, Misha Glenny, Joris Luyendijk, Saskia Sassen and Galia Benartzi” (see for more information the link to the programme).