果冻传媒

The latest entry from Vice-Chancellor Nigel Thrift's blog:

It is not exactly an original observation to write that we live in a celebrity culture. All around us are the signs of the power of celebrity and there is a seemingly endless supply of academic papers and commentaries analyzing the phenomenon. Most of these pieces don’t exactly welcome the phenomenon, it has to be said, but neither do they give much sense of how it might be dislodged.

But has celebrity culture now started to bleed into academe?

What happened in Vegas should have stayed there, but somehow it was allowed out and got away - Professor Mark Harrison from the Department of Economics explains why.

The latest entry from Vice-Chancellor Nigel Thrift's blog:

Many academic commentators on contemporary Western higher education want to harken back to what they see as a golden age of academe — and bemoan their present lot. No doubt there are things to complain about. Probably many. But it is possible to become mired in an account which sees nothing but gloom and negativity in the current academic scene and which, by implication, sees no way of ever effecting any positive changes.

Anandi Mani, Associate Professor of Economics, is one of the authors of a study on women’s political representation and its effect on crime in India. As the government reserves for women a third of all seats in local government institutions like the village council, the researchers sought to find out whether having female political leaders at the local level would have a positive effect on women. Instead, they found that the reported number of crimes against women rose. Ms. Mani explained in an e-mail interview with India Ink why that’s not bad news.

In the light of the most recent House of Lords reform failure, Dr John Parkinson from the Department of Politics and International Studies explains how, 'by taking on a battle they had no realistic hope of winning, the liberals have probably scuppered their chances of making less dramatic but very significant deliberative changes'