Other News

A podcast of an interview with Professor Adam Swift is now available on Philosophy Bites.

The podcast focuses on the issue of legitimate parental partiality: given the conflict with equality of opportunity, to what extent and in what ways may parents legitimately confer advantages on their children?

The podcast is available here: http://philosophybites.com/2014/10/adam-swift-on-parental-partiality.html

Professor Swift has recently published Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships (with Harry Brighouse), Princeton University Press 2014.

Volunteers from Warwick's Laksh project have returned home after a very successful summer. Applications are now open for current students interested in taking part in summer 2015.

The Laksh Foundation is a small NGO near Delhi, India. Over the last three years, Warwick has worked closely with the foundation, developing the partnership from a pilot scheme with just three students helping out in one teaching centre to a programme that now sees multiple groups of Warwick students working across a network of five community schools, supporting the local teachers through introducing innovative methods of teaching and learning, developing the curriculum as well as providing extracurricular tutorial classes and supervision in maths and English to 200+ pupils ages 3-18.

Current PAIS undergraduate student Rebecca Fletcher was one of this year's volunteers, below she writes about her experience.

In July 2014 I spent a month in India, thanks to an amazing Warwick project organised in collaboration with The Laksh Foundation.

Laksh is an NGO which has opened 5 tuition centres in the local villages of Mangar, Dhauj, Alampur and Silakhari, with the centre at Alampur only opening in June 2014. The aim of the tuition centres is to supplement the education that local children receive in government school, which all children have the right to attend since the implementation of the ‘Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act’ 2009.

As a team of four, our main aim was to work with the teachers at Laksh, many of whom are still in education themselves, to improve their lesson planning, their English language skills, and to encourage them to move away from teaching 'by rote'. Between July and September, 3 groups spent a month each at Laksh, and I was a part of group 1.

As it is common for teachers to rely solely on the blackboard when teaching, this is something that we wanted to challenge with the use of songs, games, and other interactive methods. Our aim was to engage the children in new and exciting ways – through music, pictures, quizzes, and games to check their understanding – and to give them a more structured lesson with a starter, main activity, and recap.

By the time we left, we had noticed a change in the confidence levels of both the children and the teachers. On our last day, the teachers performed versions of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and we were so happy with their progress, both in terms of confidence and their English skills.

Classes at Laksh focus on Hindi, English, and Maths, but also extend to broader subject areas such as health, hygiene, Science, Geography and Art. Laksh doesn’t turn any child away, and caters to a variety of levels and abilities.

The teachers at Laksh are selfless, and simply want to give their time to help the people around them. I have the utmost respect and admiration for NGOs and charities that aim to support education for the world’s children – and my time in India with The Laksh Foundation has only helped to strengthen this philosophy.

Recruitment for the 2015 project is now open. If you are a current student who enjoys a challenge, you have some teaching experience and you are able to think on your feet then visit www.warwick.ac.uk\laksh to learn more.

Please consider submitting a paper for the next Warwick Graduate Conference in Political Geography, held at the University of Warwick on 27-28 November, 2014.

Full details here – keynote from Alex Jeffrey (University of Cambridge)

Three travel grants of up to £250 each for non-UK attendees are available by Warwick’s politics department.

All potential participants should submit a title, abstract (of no more than 300 words), and evidence of institutional affiliation by 30 October, 2014 to the organisers: Antonio Ferraz de Oliveira and Mara Duer (politicalgeographywarwick@gmail.com).

SURVEILLE, an EU-funded FP7 Project led by Prof Tom Sorell and the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group (IERG) which systematically reviews the impacts of different surveillance systems and also helps manufacturers and end-users better to develop and deploy these systems, recently published some of its findings on Just Security in a 14 October article entitled 'Electronic Mass Surveillance Fails – Drastically'.

Below is an excerpt from the piece:

Our research found that electronic mass surveillance performed poorly in terms of practical usability, ethical grounds, and the protection of privacy rights, whereas traditional (non-technological) surveillance or strictly targeted electronic surveillance might have a chance to strike a “balance.” The novelty in our work is demonstrating this through semi-quantification and numerical scores.

Tobias Pforr, Teaching Fellow in International Political Economy, attended the 'Human After All' conference held earlier this year by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) in Toronto, Canada. He was sponsored by Financial Times's Young Scholars Initiative along with six other students from around the world to attend the conference out of a pool of over 600 initial applicants and was interviewed during a roundtable about his research and experience at the conference.

Read more about the event
Watch the interview with Tobias