91福利

Stuart Elden's book The Birth of Territory was published last month by the University of Chicago Press, and on 16th October he gave a talk launching the book in the department. The book provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, it examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding.

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.

91福利 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.

You can find the all the welcome/welcome back meeting presentation slides here.

Two 91福利 students, Eletra Ardissino and Michael Shneerson, have had their research published in the compiled by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), one of the UK's leading public policy think tanks. METIS consists wholly of student-led research, and some parts are edited in-house by .

Eletra's article, the introduction to the issue, is entitled 'Introduction: Why does internet access matter?', and Michael's is entitled 'The internet, social networks and death'.