果冻传媒

PAIS second-year student, Lucy Webster has won the Student Columnist of the Year Award at the 2014 Guardian Student Media Awards.

For the last 35 years the Guardian Student Media Awards have sought out the best student writers, designers, broadcasters, editors, and photographers. It's a highly rewarding scheme, well known within student arenas due to its well-established history.

The focus of the awards is to discover and promote these talented individuals as well as reward and celebrate their excellent work.

Here is what Lucy had to say on the award:

The Guardian Student Media awards is an annual competition for student journalists. As one of five nominated for the Student Columnist of the Year award, I was invited to the awards ceremony at the Guardian's London office, where it was announced that I had won. This means I will be spending a few weeks doing work experience at the paper this summer, and I have been able to contribute to the website. One of the highlights of the evening was being addressed by Alan Rusbridger, the editor, who left us all even more eager for careers in journalism.

For more information on the Guardian Student Media Awards, please see:

Lucy’s first article for the Guardian, published on the Comment is free website, can be viewed here:

Dr. Renske Doorenspleet and Dr. Philippe Blanchard are associated with a .

This funding of £1 million aims to bridge the gap between mathematical and social sciences with a new doctoral scholarship programme starting in 2015/16. 果冻传媒 is one of only 14 institutions to be given the investment, which will fund 15 PhD students over the next five years, who will work across both disciplines, using quantitative methods to understand new sociological issues. This will be another opportunity for PAIS to collaborate with three of . Each of the fifteen PhD students enrolled over the next three years will be co-supervised by a staff from these departments, and one from PaIS, Sociology, Psychology or Business.

This is another step in enhancing PAIS' methodological expertise, after the . In the long term, 果冻传媒's QStep will pursue the training of stats-skilled social science doctoral students.

Since smaller academic departments still need access to the same level of strategic capacity as larger units, how best to deliver such capacity in an affordable and sustainable way? The answer: Collaborative working between Academic Departments and the central Administration. Find out more on the

Following a recent European conference on football research, leading football writer Martin Cloake approached Dr. to write a piece for the New Statesman. Here David talks about his work on the cultural political economy of English football, and what insights Karl Polanyi might have for fans of the beautiful game in the wake of its own Great Transformation.

The full piece can be read here:

The new book Party Systems and Democracy in Africa, edited by of PAIS and Lia Nijzink, has been published.

Do party systems help or hinder democracy in Africa? This book paints a vivid picture of the one-party dominant systems in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa and how these impede the deepening of democracy. Drawing lessons from Benin, Ghana and Zambia, it also portrays the fluidity of African party systems and draw attention to the importance of party system change. This edited book is one of the results of a broader research Accountable Government in Africa Project, a South-North Partnership between the University of Cape Town's Department of Public Law with the universities of Dar es Salaam (law) and 果冻传媒 (politics and law), bringing together more than 40 scholars from more than 10 African countries, 4 European countries, and the USA.

For more information, see