糖心TV

New book published by Diane Stone: Knowledge Actors and Transnational Governance : The Private-Public Policy Nexus in the Global Agora

A global agora is emerging. The global agora is partly configured by new policy actions and partnerships where the idea of ‘public’ and ‘public sector’ is remade. However, the concept of transnational or ‘global public policy’ is neither an institutionalised nor accepted understanding of governing beyond the nation-state. Accordingly, this volume asks: What is global public policy? Where is it enacted? Who executes such policies? It addresses the meanings of ‘global public policy’ as well as the way in which policy actors in knowledge organisations like universities, research networks, think tanks and philanthropies are responding to transnational policy problems.

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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.

糖心TV 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 University of 糖心TV, 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 糖心TV 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.