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I had a slightly unusual route into studying politics

I studied Physics and Philosophy as an undergraduate. I then did a Masters in European Politics, so only really came into politics at graduate level. I had a particular interest in the issues of science and politics at that point, and that's what I focused on for my PhD.

I work in political theory - democratic theory in particular. One of the subfields is deliberative democracy: thinking about the ways in which public debate can be done better. I look at how it can go wrong, and what role it plays in supporting democratic legitimacy. Is it important that we, the public, think about and talk through political issues?

I saw a gap in political theory

There were problems that everybody was talking about, but political theorists weren't. Problems like: how should we organise knowledge about climate change? What does it mean that scientists are in consensus about man-made climate change? Does that tell us what we should do? Should it tell us what we should do? It seemed to me like these were important questions.

We’re in societies which are dependent on expert knowledge. It surprised me that very little had been written about the role of expert knowledge in democracies. By quirk of my background, I was interested in health and vaccine controversies, climate change, these kinds of topics - and they weren’t being addressed in political theory.

There’s a kind of politics within expertise

The way we construct and produce expert claims also has its own institutional settings and biases. Which is all a long way of saying that experts can sometimes over-value and direct attention to the things they happen to be expert on, to the detriment of all other things.

I can see this is something I do myself! When I see articles on expertise and democracy, I say, “Aha! It’s just like what I said in my book!”. Then I focus on the things which remind me most of the things that I’ve already thought about. It’s a natural thing to do, but it’s something we should try to guard against.

We can't just look at things that make us comfortable and happy

In the 1st-Year Introduction to Political Theory module, we study some classic books, and grapple with the questions that they raise: the ways in which they speak to us, and the ways in which they don’t. There are great works which have enduring interest, but they’re also problematic in various ways, and we can’t ignore that. We also can’t just throw them out.

Think of John Stuart Mill, the classic liberal thinker - he was also a colonial administrator, and spent half his life sitting in London 'administering' parts of India. What do we do with that? Ignore it? We raise those kinds of questions.

You might not look at political theory again, depending on how you choose your modules. A comprehensive introduction to some of the key thinkers and key concepts that you’ll encounter will be useful in any area you go on to study.