Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

You will notice that this editorial is not authored by our Chair Hannah West but me! Tegan Harrison, the new Newsletter Editor. Any mistakes are unfortunately therefore, my own! More on our committee roles below.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! On behalf of the committee, I hope you are all having a wonderful Christmas and are able to take a bit of a break from everything before the new year commences. But we appreciate too that not everyone will have had the same experience over Christmas, perhaps because of being ill, feeling lonely or working to deadlines early in the New Year so we hope that if this is how it is for you that you are able to reach out and find support. And please know that we are a supportive bunch so if you are struggling with your studies or work, have just got stuck on something or need a friendly chat with someone who is going through something similar please do message us. We hope that our reintroductions to the committee below can show what an eclectic set of members we have and that you can find someone who shares a similar interest, background or vocation as you.

You will notice that this is a much shorter version of our newsletter than usual. Between work, holiday plans and various other engagements, this time of year is always a busy one so we thought it a perfect time to wrap up another fantastic year of the DRN, share some of our aims for what we're sure will be an exciting 2024 and reintroduce our super committee. I hope you enjoy reading the summary from our most recent committee ‘Big Meeting' which includes some information about our 2023 growth, how we will operate and make decisions going forward, our aims for the new year as well as the latest biographies of some of our committee members. Below you will notice a few committee changes but in particular you will see that Veronika Poniscjakova and Baris Celik have joined Hannah West as DRN Co-Chairs. I would like to thank all three for your continued dedication to the DRN. You’ll make for a wonderful team and I for one, feel very assured under your leadership!

Of course, my biggest thanks go to you all! Your support and readership is invaluable and we would love to hear from you if you have any ideas you would like to work with us on ahead of our 2024 program. We have made it our mission to try and connect with different networks and organisations so if you are part of one we haven't been in touch with then do give us a shout, we would love to have a chat and share what you do with our network. And if you think that you would be interested in being more involved with the DRN then we are always on the look out for new committee members both to share the workload but also to make new friends.

Our newsletter readership of continues to grow as does our X (previously Twitter) interaction. This is great news for all of you too because it means we have a platform to share your research to an interested audience and we know from the responses we receive that it is read far beyond the ECR community. So please don't forget to share your publications (we love to promote these!), calls for papers, events and anything else you have been up to (from reviews of events, books, podcasts).

All the best for a refreshed start to 2024!

Tegan Harrison
Newsletter Editor of the Defence Research Network

See the full newsletter here: Wrap Up and (Re)introductions

Visit the Newsletter Catalogue to catch up on all our past issues!