糖心TV

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.

Associate Professor was recently awarded two ESRC grants.

The first is an ESRC knowledge exchange grant entitled “Kenya 2013-2014: From election monitoring to longer-term reform” for which Gabrielle is principal investigator and Nic Cheeseman (Oxford) and Justin Willis (Durham) are co-investigators.

The second is an ESRC standard grant entitled “The impact of elections: voting, political behaviour and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa”, on which Willis is the principal investigator and Cheeseman and Gabrielle are co-investigators.

On 10 September, Trevor McCrisken was interviewed on BBC Radio Oxford about how President Obama is handling the US response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria. You can until 16 September; the interview begins 21 minutes into the broadcast.

On August 26-28, Prof Franklyn Lisk participated in the Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute (HESPI) and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) Conference on Rebuilding Viable State and Effective Institutions in Somalia. This three-day consultative meeting held in Addis Ababa brought together representatives across Somali leadership and civil society, as well as academics, professionals, and experts on post-conflict reconstruction. The main objectives were to contribute to the current assessment of the country's priority needs; provide support to the new government of the Federal Republic of Somalia in its endeavours to plan, formulate, and implement a coherent programme for the rebuilding of a viable and effective state; and to foster dialogue that promotes the exchange of ideas and new thinking among policy makers and the country's developed partners.

Prof Lisk presented on post-conflict reconstruction and the challenges of sustainable development in Africa. The conference report will be prepared by HESPI to communicate the key findings and messages from the conference papers and keynote speeches to assist the federal Government of Somalia in planning and formulating its near and medium term strategy for reconstruction and institution building.

Proceedings will become available on the HESPI website, where the is already available.

, Professor in PAIS and an Associate Fellow with , was recently quoted in a 21 August article on the Bo Xilai murder trial featured on NBCNews.com entitled ''.

Below is an excerpt from the piece:

“There is this feeling that elites are running the country for themselves and their kids are running around in Lamborghinis and Ferraris. It is a key cause of resentment among the general population,” Breslin said.