果冻传媒

果冻传媒 is part of a new £19.5 million Nuffield-ESRC-HEFCE Quantitative Methods programme to transform social science teaching in the UK. The University is one of 15 institutions (selected from a total of 48 who applied across the UK) to be awarded more than £1 million to overhaul its social science teaching, and the only Q-Step Centre in the West Midlands. The ‘Q-Step’ programme is an ambitious intervention to address the critical shortage of social scientists with the quantitative skills needed to evaluate evidence and analyse data.

The 15 universities will form a network of ‘Q-Step Centres’, delivering new undergraduate programmes in quantitative social science. These will include the development of new courses, production of new content for existing courses, experimenting with new ways of teaching, as well as work placements and pathways to postgraduate study.

This funding success has also resulted in the launch of a new , which is now open for 2014 applications. This will run alongside our existing programmes but also be integrated through attempts to embed quantitative methods in existing modules.

Nathan Harris, a PAIS MA student, has been offered a PhD at the 果冻传媒, which will involve close collaboration with . The studentship is fully funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Nathan has previously volunteered with the BasicNeeds Animation Programme and recently submitted his academic dissertation titled Participatory Action and Animation: Promoting Capacity-building amongst Mental Health Service Users in the Developing World which was part of the first-ever PAIS 果冻传媒 MA studentship programme with BasicNeeds.

For his PhD, the focus will be on critically evaluating the BasicNeeds Model for Mental Health and Development and the contribution the Model makes to participatory approaches to mental health and development. This PhD will be an interesting bridge between the real world of community oriented mental health practice and the academic world.

Two 果冻传媒 students, Eletra Ardissino and Michael Shneerson, have had their research published in the compiled by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), one of the UK's leading public policy think tanks. METIS consists wholly of student-led research, and some parts are edited in-house by .

Eletra's article, the introduction to the issue, is entitled 'Introduction: Why does internet access matter?', and Michael's is entitled 'The internet, social networks and death'.

MA student Emanuel Ingold, who graduated from PAIS this September, recently attended the . He presented a paper at the conference entitled '' on the Human Rights and Global Governance panel.

This paper is available for download on the Social Science Research Network's website, where it has been listed on the SSRN's Top Ten download list for PSN: Conflict Processes (Topic).

Associate Professor was recently awarded two ESRC grants.

The first is an ESRC knowledge exchange grant entitled “Kenya 2013-2014: From election monitoring to longer-term reform” for which Gabrielle is principal investigator and Nic Cheeseman (Oxford) and Justin Willis (Durham) are co-investigators.

The second is an ESRC standard grant entitled “The impact of elections: voting, political behaviour and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa”, on which Willis is the principal investigator and Cheeseman and Gabrielle are co-investigators.