School of Social & Political Sciences

Welcome to more lecturing staff joining us at the School this year: Rhys Machold, Lecturer in International Relations; Douglas Robertson, Lecturer in Urban Studies, David Alexander, Lecturer in European Politics; and Bernhard Reinsberg, Lecturer in International Relations.

 

Rhys Machold

Rhys Machold is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Glasgow. Taking an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, his research focuses on issues of violence, security and policing within contemporary urban spaces. This work further engages with the political economies of security industries and security markets. He has held positions as an Assistant Professor at York University, Toronto, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Balsilie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, as a Guest Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen and as a Visiting Researcher at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

His current research, which extends his doctoral work carried out in Palestine/Israel, India and the UK, explores how security knowledge moves geographically by examining transnational circuits of police training. It takes a multi-sited approach to analyse how forms of policy learning take place through embodied, experiential practices in, across, and between different countries. As part of this work, he has closely interrogated the concept of policing and security “laboratories” in understanding how certain policy experiences are constituted as exemplary cases or “models” worthy of emulation elsewhere. Theoretically, Rhys’ research is influenced by post-structuralism, post-colonialism, settler colonialism, gender studies, assemblage theory and science and technology studies. It further draws on a range of critical methodological approaches including ethnography and mobile methods.

 

Douglas Robertson

Dr Douglas Robertson has joined Urban Studies on a six-month contract. Having retired in 2016, after 30 years of teaching and researching at the University of Stirling, he has undertaken consultancy commissions from the Scottish Government, of owners missing shares in common repair works, Highlands and Islands Enterprise on the impact of recent bank closures, Build Environment Forum for Scotland, reviewing common repair practice in Scotland, and for Shelter Scotland, on rent regulation mechanisms in the private rented sector. His new role is to cover the housing studies teaching of Nigel Sprigings who retires in October.

He chaired the Scottish Government’s PRS Strategy Group (from 2009 through to 2016), whose recommendations fed into the Private Rented Housing (Scotland) Act, 2011, the Scottish Government's PRS strategy 'A place to call home', the Housing (Scotland) Act, 2014 and the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act, 2016. Douglas presented regular reports on this work at both academic and policy conferences throughout the UK, and regularly at the annual symposium of European Network of Housing Researchers Working Group on the PRS. Throughout this period, he also served on the Scottish Government's Housing Advisory Group, which in 2015 became the Housing Delivery Group.

Douglas’ academic areas of interest include: Housing practices, most recently private tenancy laws & their regulation, public policy, social theory and its links to place, belonging & identity, conceptions of ‘home’, private property management systems, European social housing, Scottish housing & planning history. He retains a long-standing interest in tenements and the challenge of ensuring their management and maintenance. He also holds an Honorary Professorship at the University of Stirling.

 

David Alexander

David is joining the school as a Lecturer in European Politics. He completed his PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2017 and since then he has been working as an Associate Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, before returning to take up this appointment. His interests include comparative politics, European/EU politics and institutional systems. Currently his research focuses on membership turnover and its counterintuitive impact upon expertise within the committee system of the European Parliament. He has previously worked as a GTA within politics at Glasgow, teaching a range of topics. In his spare time David enjoys landscape/abstract painting and is a member of several art groups in and around Glasgow.

 

Bernhard Reinsberg

Bernhard Reinsberg is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Glasgow, and is also affiliated to the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Zurich, an MA in Comparative and International Studies at ETH Zurich and BA degrees in Political Science (Freie Universität Berlin) and Mathematics (University in Hagen).

His research broadly covers the political economy of international organisations – such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – and seeks to contribute to a better understanding of what drives their behaviour and when their development interventions are effective. One line of his research examines the heterogeneous impacts of different policy conditions in International Monetary Fund lending programmes on state capacity and other sociopolitical outcomes.

He also studies the institutional design determinants of contemporary international institutions such as trust funds, whereby donor countries provide earmarked funding to international development organizations. The rise of trust funds chimes with a more general trend toward governance beyond formal intergovernmental organizations in the international system. Using primarily quantitative analysis, he is currently examining underlying determinants and potential implications of such informal governance mechanisms.

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First published: 20 September 2018