School of Social and Political Science

£3 trillion later

Join us for an In Conversation With event, with guest Sir Robert Stheeman, former CEO of the UK Debt Management Office

Diverging Paths: The Onset of Gender-and-Class Differentiated Family Labour in Young Adolescence

All Q-Step seminars are on Mondays at 1-2pm in the Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building. They are open to all students and staff. Events are free. No booking is required.

Scams, bubbles and the financial technologies of data societies

This session will include a presentation by Professor Liz McFall and a presentation by Dr Lana Swartz.

Making unfreedom material: Prison construction and the expedience of mass incarceration in Brazil

Meet the Editors of Global Constitutionalism

This hybrid event is particularly aimed at early career researchers and PhD students, but is open to anyone who has considered submitting a paper to Glob Con and wanted more information.

Roundtable on Global Constitutionalism and Enlightenment Ideas

The roundtable event celebrates the hosting of the Cambridge University Press journal Global Constitutionalism at the University of Edinburgh since 2025, in a partnership between the School of Social and Political Science and the School of Law.

Extractive Capitalism

Join Laleh Khalili for a discussion of her book, ‘Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy

Is journalism relevant in the post-truth society?

The challenges of platformed communication, contested expertise, and illiberal democract, with Professor Silvio Waisbord

The birth of scientific anti-racisms

In 1948, as the United Nations (UN) sought to build support for its Universal Declaration of Universal Human Rights, it asked the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization (UNESCO) to disseminate “scientific facts” that countered racism. The resulting UNESCO Expert Statements on Race became paradigmatic reference points for the celebrated anti-racist claim that race has no basis in biology.

'An object’s narrative never ends': an Ethnographic view of Ethics, Temporality and Insecurity

How do we do community-based food-focussed research and how do fieldwork and theory relate to each when doing it?

Unbordering Futures: Migration Studies in Urgent Times

Organised by Edinburgh’s Citizenship and Migration Research Network (CMRN) / Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNet)

Social Work with Unmarried Mothers and Their Children: Learning from the Past

This seminar marks the publication of a book of the same title and also coincides with the 80th anniversary of the official opening of Edzell Lodge Children’s home in Edinburgh in 1946.