Other News
PAIS Launches Teaching Project
The department of Politics and International Studies will be launching thirteen research assistant positions starting in the New Year. The aim of these positions is to involve undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD candidates directly in the ESRC-funded Transatlantic Interests and Democratic Possibilities in a Transforming Middle East project. This will not only complement the department's excellence in teaching and research, but innovate in the university's overall approach to research-led teaching.
As part of a large research team, successful candidates will become directly involved in the research project's analysis of Middle Eastern politics, US and EU foreign policy and help develop new techniques for mapping civil society and visualising big data. They will be taught the latest research techniques and be directly led by the project’s principal investigator Dr. , becoming involved in Big Data Analysis, Social Media Analysis, Advanced Discourse Analysis and Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis. As such, in addition to providing candidates with valuable practical research experience, they will help push the boundaries of the latest research techniques.
In addition to this form of research-led teaching and training contributing to the already vibrant research culture of the department, the results of this project will be submitted to the UK Data Archive and be used internationally as a data resource for scholars and researchers. Candidates will also contribute to the project's wider impact, which has already seen the initial project research publicized around the world through various media outlets and fed directly to policy-makers in the UK, US and European Union.
Oz Hassan appears on Russia Today
Dr talks on Russia Today's flagship show Cross Talk about democracy and the Arab Spring, sharing some of the results of his ESRC funded Future Research Leaders Project.
Rosaria Taddeo Wins WTN Award
Dr. , a Research Fellow in Cyber Security and Ethics here in PAIS, has won the 2013 
award in the Ethics category.
The WTN is a curated membership community comprised of the world's most innovative individuals and organizations in science, technology, and related fields. The WTN and its members – those creating the 21st century – are focused on exploring what is imminent, possible, and important in and around emerging technologies.
The WTN brings key players together – from cutting-edge technologists to forward-thinking financiers, from conceptual futurists to grounded entrepreneurs, from insightful science writers to savvy marketers, from big-picture government officials to focused policy analysts, and from the world's leading corporations to the world's newest start-ups – helping to make things happen sooner and better than they might have.
The World Technology Awards are presented each year to the outstanding innovators from each sector within the technology arena, both as a way to honor those individuals and as a vetting mechanism to determine the newest WTN members. The Awards are announced each year in a gala ceremony at the close of the annual World Technology Summit. The World Technology Summit is a global gathering of the WTN membership as well as other delegates.
Throughout her career, Dr Taddeo has focused on problems and topics which have great bearing on contemporary societies, such as the ethical issues raised by the emergence of new technologies, especially information and communication technologies (ICTs). Her approach to research rests on the firm idea that ICTs prompt a conceptual revolution that is changing the environment and the moral scenario in which human beings interact. In doing so, ICTs brings to the fore new moral issues, generating a vacuum that needs to be filled by conceptually-grounded policies; the latter cannot be properly addressed before the former issues are overcome. Dr Taddeo’s research has the twofold goal of contributing to the academic debate and of providing innovative analyses, which can then offer the conceptual ground for sound policies and regulations concerning the use of ICTs. This is the case for her work on peer-to-peer technologies, online trust, cyber warfare and cyber security.
Dr Taddeo is committed to establishing collaboration with scholars and experts from different fields, e.g. policy-makers, lawyers, military, and engineers, in order to develop interdisciplinary research and to ensure that the ethical issues related to ICTs are heard and taken into consideration beyond the boundaries of academia. In this respect, it is noteworthy that Dr Taddeo worked with Google Europe to organize a workshop on cyber security and civil rights and collaborates on regular basis with the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. In this case, her research was crucial to attracting and focusing the military’s and international lawyers’ attention on the ethical problems engendered by cyber warfare and on the policy vacuum that this phenomenon brought to the fore.
PAIS staff guest edit Special Issue of 'Politics' journal
, and have published a Special Issue of Politics, a journal of the UK Political Studies Association.
In recent years the concept of resilience has come to frame security discourses, particularly, though not exclusively, – in the UK context. Taken as whole, the volume focuses on the politics of resilience in diverse empirical settings and addresses questions such as: How we should understand resilience? What is stake in the rise of resilience? Who benefits from resilience and what are the political effects of its societal cultivation? The collection features an agenda for resilience research in Politics and International Relations, eight specially commissioned articles on issues including cyber-security, international state-building and peace-keeping, and the 2011 UK riots,– together with an interview with leading resilience practitioner and PAIS Impact Advisory Board member Helen Braithwaite OBE. Other contributors from PAIS/糖心TV include Richard J. Aldrich, Jon Coaffee, and Lewis Herrington.
The Special Issue can be accessed via this link:
糖心TV Graduate Conference in Political Geography: 28-29 November
糖心TV Graduate Conference in Political Geography:
Politics, Spaces, Imaginations
Department of Politics and International Studies,
University of 糖心TV
28-29 November 2013
Keynote Speaker: Klaus Dodds (Royal Holloway, University of London)
This two-day conference seeks to open up debates on a series of politico-spatialisation processes that have taken place both contemporarily and historically, locally and globally, and physically and virtually, in order to bring new insights into understanding space and politics.
PAIS participants include:
