Greetings from the new EISA President and Executive Secretary

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are honoured to be nominated by the Governing Board and humbled by the General Assembly’s decision to elect us as the new President and Executive Secretary of EISA. We wanted to give you a quick update to highlight some of our immediate plans and objectives for the association.

As you all know too well, since March 2020 the board has had to take a number of emergency measures to minimise the impact of the pandemic on our activities. These have included, among others, postponing our signature events PEC and EWIS in 2020 and organising them virtually in 2021. Notwithstanding the considerable financial pressure we have faced throughout the pandemic, EISA has weathered the storm and is heading into 2022 with a strong organisational and financial structure. We would like to recognise the resolute leadership of Beate Jahn (President 2019–2121) and Maria Mälksoo (Executive Secretary 2018–2021) in expertly guiding the association through this challenging period. We also would like to extend our sincerest thanks to the departing board members Valeria Bello, Maj Grasten and Anna Leander for generously committing their time and labour to EISA over the past 4 years. We are thrilled to welcome Thierry Balzacq, Beste İşleyen, Corina Lacatus, Debbie Lisle and Sonia Lucarelli to the Governing Board. Our new members are bringing significant organisational expertise and intellectual diversity to the board, and have already begun working on their respective portfolios.

For the 2021–2023 term, we are keen to build on the work of our predecessors by strengthening EISA’s key activities and embarking on new projects to better serve our members. Specifically, we will be focusing on:

• Expanding our sources of support for PhD students, early career researchers, and those who face financial and/or institutional precarity, and making our events and resources as accessible as possible to marginalised communities of scholarship in and beyond Europe.
• Developing a programme of events and professional resources to engage with our members on a continual basis throughout the year.
• Upgrading our digital infrastructure by building a brand new EISA website and streamlining the way we host and manage our membership accounts, PEC and EWIS.
• Expanding our repertoire of multimedia resources by launching a brand new EISA podcast and further investing in digital media.

At the beginning of this year, Beate Jahn highlighted that EISA strives to act as ‘a counterweight to the neoliberalisation of knowledge production’. As the new executive committee, we would like to reaffirm our commitment to this vision. We will continue to champion EISA’s mission to cultivate a pluralist and inclusive community, and steer the association democratically and transparently in continual communication with our members.

We all look forward to seeing you all in person soon. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any feedback or if you would like to take part in EISA activities.

Cemal Burak Tansel (President) & Gabi Schlag (Executive Secretary)