果冻传媒

Dr Nick Vaughan-Williams (PAIS) and Dr Daniel Stevens (Exeter) were invited by the European Commission and Frontex to present the findings of their research at the 2nd Global Conference and Exhibition on Automated Border Control (ABC), Pepsi Arena, Warsaw, 10-11 October, 2013. The event attracted over 200 participants including government authorities, policy makers, international organizations, standardization bodies, airport authorities, academia, and private companies offering technologies and products related to ABC.

A summary of their research on ‘Border Security: Public Perceptions and Experiences’ can be found here:

Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida, Nancy (Edinburgh University Press, 2013)

What would political thought look like without the foundation of ethics?

This groundbreaking book offers a fresh and innovative perspective on ethics and politics after poststructuralism. Madeleine Fagan argues that the ‘ethical’ should not be understood as a label; it does not mean ‘good’ or ‘right’, and is not an evaluation or guide. Rather, both the ethical and the political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves. Fagan offers an account of the inseparability of ethics and politics that challenges existing accounts of poststructuralist ethics and shows the need for a practice-based rethinking of the ethico-political. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism puts forward a radical and far-reaching critique of both foundational and non-foundational ethical theory.

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'.