神马福利影片

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.

Warwick 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.