Other News
Trevor McCrisken on BBC World TV
PAIS Associate Professor appeared live on BBC World TV programme "Impact" on Friday November 29th. Trevor participated in a discussion on Guantanamo Bay and talked about the reasons why President Obama is finding it so difficult to make good on his pledge to close the detention facility. The programme focused on the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British citizen being held, who was first detained by the US authorities 12 years ago. Also taking part in the discussion were the lawyer for Shaker Aamer, Clive Stafford Smith, and Dr David Nicholl, who has written about the medical ethics of force-feeding hunger-striking detainees. Trevor focused on the political barriers being faced by the Obama administration in its attempts to release or transfer to the US or to third countries.
You can watch the video below:
MA student wins Political Geography prize
糖心TV MA student António Ferraz de Oliveira has been jointly awarded the 2013 Dissertation Prize by the Political Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers). The dissertation was entitled “Space of Exception (?) - Christiania’s Alternative”, and was completed at the University of Cambridge. António will be going on to study for a PhD in PaIS following the completion of his MA.
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.
Adam Swift - 3rd Edition of Political Philosophy: A Beginners' Guide for Students and Politicians
The 3rd edition of Adam Swift's accessible and widely-used introduction to Political Philosophy has just been published by Polity Press. As well as updating the material on social justice, liberty, equality, community and democracy, the new edition adds discussion of gender justice, global justice and questions of method in political theory.
Previous editions have been translated into Chinese, Czech, Japanese, Korean and Polish. A Greek translation of the new edition is progress.