Andrea Baumeister is a Doctor of Politics at the University of Stirling and her research focuses on justice, citizenship, cultural diversity and gender, those topics being her main interests. Dr Baumeister completed her DPhil at the University of York, and following a time in which she taught at the University of Manchester she joined the University of Stirling in 1996. She has a particular interest in engaging students with liberal political philosophy and having taken her module Great Political Thinkers this semester, I can say that she is a fantastic academic with a passion for supporting her students. For that reason I hope you enjoy and appreciate her interview.
1.) What achievement are you most proud of?
I’m proud of having inspired students to take a genuine interest in political theory, to share some of my interests and to engage them in asking difficult questions. Most students when they first encounter proper political theory shy away from it and it’s very rewarding when you can bring them around and generate the interest and engagement. Also the reading requires a little bit more work, it’s a little bit harder and the writing can be dense, to persuade people it’s worth it and again see the light go on and people running with that – it’s enormously rewarding.
Invariably you are most attached to what you just doing at the moment and professionally and proud of having contributed to the environment. I’m proud that I’ve contributed in doing my share including three years as Head of Division at one point. I’ve done just about every administrative job that’s going around, and I’m proud of the fact that I’m managing to juggle these three balls and striking a balance between them.
2.) If you were to pick a woman from history or the present who inspires you, who would you pick and why?
I’ll give you a woman who did inspire me as a teenager. As an early teenager I read a biography of Madam Curie, the Polish physicist, and this was the first time I had read about the life of a genuinely pioneering academic woman and that just made me see what can be done. It was a book in the library of a guest house we were staying in, I picked it up and started reading and wouldn’t let go. She was very much an inspiration to me and very much shaped my engagement. I didn’t come to the Arts and Humanities immediately and have had interests in the science school and only decided later on to specialise in politics. However that kind of trail-blazing that she did, that was an inspiration to me.
3.) Where do you see your life going in the 20s? And what would you like to achieve?
Well professionally of course, I’ve already been in my job for quite a long time and I’m starting to think about moving more towards retirement and when that will come – which is less than a decade away. I think what matters to me professionally and looking around it, we have really made some significant changes in our department. We’ve had a lot of new colleagues come in recently, and the interesting thing is that we’ve successfully changed the gender balance of the division. For a very long time I was the only woman working in Politics in Stirling, now more than 50% of people working in the division are women. And that has been a concerted effort and a concerted push by all of us. This has been built in the process of the last six, seven years. It goes to show it can be done, and a person that should receive a lot of credit as part of this is my colleague Professor Paul Cairney, who pushed also on that front to promote this. It goes to show that when you acknowledge this as an issue, particularly within politics as a social science, of all the social sciences politics is still the most male and you notice that when you go to academic conferences that it’s definitely very male. When you make a conscious effort in that regard and encourage women to apply for academic posts, that you do get somewhere. I very much appreciate and enjoy the environment this has brought, by having more women colleagues and I would like to see that carry on. To be able maintain that gender parity and to see it grow further beyond our own university because I think there’s still nowhere near enough of us. That is one thing I would like to see.
The other thing is to get the project I am working on now, which is some material on religion and liberal polity, I would like to see that through to completion – I’ve been working on that for a while. And in terms of wider ambitions I would like to see more women in senior roles around me and I’m keen to do whatever I can to promote that.
4.) How would you like to feel by the end of the decade?
I think we’ve gone through a very difficult decade, more than a decade. Since the financial crash of 2008 things have been difficult, this has also been reflected in the trials and tribulations that are Brexit and the trials and tribulations of US Politics. I think what I would like to feel at the end of the decade is to have a sense of renewed optimism. And I’ve not even mentioned the climate crisis, at the moment it feels like a lot of issues that have created uncertainty and make the future quite worrying. And I hope we can step through this and regain our optimism. I’m also very mindful that after the 2008 financial crash, research shows that at least in the initial years it was yet again women who were particularly harshly impacted. In these types of crises time and time again women are impacted more significantly because they are more marginal in the workplace, who have other kinds of commitments which limit their flexibility and struggle with an environment that isn’t as friendly as it ought to be. Therefore these kinds of periods of uncertainty are particularly worrying for women and I hope we can get through those. I would like to feel at the end of the twenties a sense of optimism for the future, that we have made some progress, we’ve gotten some of these issues resolved and we’re moving forward. That we have made genuine progress.
5.) What is your key message for women and girls internationally?
To believe in yourself. To truly believe in yourself and your abilities and to get involved in the things that you care about. To challenge yourself for things that potentially put you outside your comfort zone. I think if women believed in themselves more, there is so much that that we can do.
*Thank you so much for Andrea’s involvement in this project. As a young woman studying politics she is a true inspiration to me and I wish her all the best in continuing to engage students with academia and political theory.*
Women of the Twenties 