UPDATE (9 October): And now welcoming Jairus Grove!

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We are almost four years old. Four! And like any unnatural creature, we require the lifeblood of others to survive. And the odd bit of cosmetics for our decaying visage. Thus there is a new look, and a joyous bundle of new residents to introduce. Those that have visited with us before are already featured on that there sidebar, and will be joined by the rest as posts tumble forth.

Please be upstanding in your welcome for the following chumrades:

• Jamie Allinson is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Westminster. His work encompasses authoritarianism and nationalism in the Middle East, historical sociology, and drone warfare. In his spare time he enjoys writing pointed letters to The London Review of Books.

• Charmaine Chua is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Minnesota, where she toils over critical political economy, postcolonial theory, logistics, and the international division of labor. In the next year, she will be conducting field research with activists and maritime workers in Long Beach, Singapore, and on a 90,000 ton container ship traveling from Los Angeles to Taiwan. She plans to climb containers for sport in between interviews.

• Megan Daigle, who wrote this great post for us last year, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg. Her first book, From Cuba With Love: Sex and Money in the Twenty-First Century, will be published by the University of California Press in February 2015.

• Jairus Victor Grove teaches the future at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Receiving his PhD from John Hopkins, his work has since encompassed cybernetics, drone war, materialism (the new kind), improvised explosive devices, and ecology, all by way of political theory. There are ways to leverage contemporary technologies in order to hear his voice and see his face.

• Lee Jones is currently researching the governance of non-traditional security and the politics of international sanctions. Lee is the author of ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia, and a regular commentator on political events in the region (here he is on Al Jazeera). His opinions are also available on Twitter.

• Laleh Khalili teaches and researches Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her latest book is Time In The Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies, which last year also happened to win both the Susan Strange best book prize from BISA and the International Political Sociology best book prize at ISA. You can also follow her intellectual adventures in the politics of transport infrastructure at The Gamming.

• Anthony J. Langlois works on human rights, global justice and Australian foreign policy. His recent publications include ‘Is Global Justice a Mirage?’, ‘Hard Questions for Human Rights’ and ‘Social Connection and Political Responsibility: An Engagement with Iris Marion Young’. He, too, has been here before.

• Can Mutlu‘s latest work is on research method in critical security studies. He is a recent product of the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, and now teaches IR at the University of Bilkent, Turkey. He is also on the Editorial Team at International Political Sociology. A student once described his teaching method as “intimidating, but in a good way”.

• Kerem Nisancioglu received his PhD from the University of Sussex earlier this year for a thesis on The Ottomans in Europe: Uneven and Combined Development and Eurocentrism. He has also written on the Gezi Park protests and student occupations in the UK, and used to blog at the wonderfully named History Three. But now he is ours.

• Laura J. Shepherd is a hugely prolific interrogator of gender and security practices, with interests in pedagogy and popular culture. Her first post at The Disorder – ‘Transdisciplinarity: The Politics and Practices of Knowledge Production’ – is also one of our most popular (possibly because she makes all her students read it). She is also co-founder of the Women, Peace and Security Academic Collective. Laura tweets intermittently from @drljshepherd but does not really understand Instagram.