September 2022

Dear members of the Local Politics and Governance specialist group,

We hope you all enjoyed the summer and are looking forward to the start of term without too much trepidation… We’ve got a few announcements:

We’re very pleased to announce that we will be holding an event on The future of Levelling Up: Does it have one? on Friday 21 October. The seminar will be online-only, between 1-3pm, and we have the following speakers from academia and practice lined up:

• Arianna Giovannini (De Montfort University)
• Andy Hollingsworth (Greater Manchester Combined Authority)
• Matthew Barton (Cornwall Council)

We will send out more details and a link to book in due course, but hopefully you can get the date in your diaries in the meantime.

The deadline for sending us your abstracts for next year’s PSA conference is this coming Friday, 9 September. Thanks to those of you who have submitted already! We will organise the papers into panels early next week, before submitting them to the PSA. We will get back in touch with everyone who has sent in an abstract as soon as the PSA confirm whether these proposed panels have been accepted. If you’ve not sent yours in yet, please just reply to this email or contact J.M.A.Willett@exeter.ac.uk or peter.eckersley@ntu.ac.uk.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that we got authorisation from the PSA to change the name of our specialist group to ‘Local Politics and Governance’. We’ve updated our webpage accordingly.

All the best,

Pete, Joanie, Tom and Sofia