Guest post by Katherine Marshall, who will be one of the panelists at tomorrow’s webinar on ‘Emergent Agency in a time of Covid 19’ (register here) Religious actors and transparency/accountability advocates ought to be natural allies, but all too often, they barely communicate, much less work actively together. That is a huge missed opportunity for both sides. In the many

A couple of posts to whet your appetite for our seminar on Thursday on ‘Emergent Agency in a time of Covid-19’. Last week Civicus, the global network of civil society organizations (CSOs) published an excellent report on ‘Solidarity in the Time of Covid-19’. It’s an upbeat 60 page snapshot of a vast amount of CSO activity around the world –

Gonna let the dust settle before I attempt to pull together some thoughts on the US election, but in the meantime: There weren’t many laughs, so thanks to Owen Barder for ‘This is how an election count looks in a well-functioning democracy.’ And elsewhere, some nice gallows humour. Egypt v Brazil v US on election counting times. Egypt wins (I

In September we kicked off a really interesting project on ‘Emergent Agency in a Time of Covid’, asking people if they wanted to be part of a collective effort to share and discuss the grassroots responses to the pandemic and start to explore their longer-term legacy. The response was encouraging (even a bit overwhelming!), and we’ve spent the last couple

While we’re all chewing our nails about the US election, here’s recent LSE Masters student Hanna Toda with a post on how to keep learning while job-hunting. Job applications can be an anxious waiting game for many students who have just finished their degrees. It can also feel exciting and/or overwhelming at how much more there still is to learn

Thought I’d repost this book review from 2018 today. No particular reason…. A lot of the power of a successful book is in its ‘big idea’ – the overall frame that endures long after the detailed arguments have faded in the memory. On that basis, ‘How to Rig an Election’ looks set to do very well indeed. The authors are

The wheels of academia grind slowly, but eventually grind out some fascinating stuff. Five years ago, I was involved in a series of conversations about the need for research on the history of redistribution in developing countries. What can we learn from low/middle income countries that have actually managed to reduce inequality (a bit like Ha-Joon Chang’s work on trade

Mathiness ht Antony Green → I do like an academic paper that confirms my prejudices….. ‘Jargon isn’t a sign of expertise; it’s a signal of insecurity. Based on 9 studies: when people lack status, they resort to unnecessarily technical language in an attempt to look smart. When they have status, they’re more concerned with communicating clearly.’ And check out the

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Blimey. You never know when a tweet is going to hit the spot and get a lot of retweets and likes. That’s what happened this week with a map I tweeted from The Economist, taken from an article entitled ‘The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights’ (gated). Quite a lot of questions and disagreement came in, so

It’s Open Access Week this week (what, you’d missed it?), which I generally use as an excuse to do my annual round-up of stats on How Change Happens, and make the case for OA books, not just journals. Bit of background. The book was published by OUP in October 2016. We negotiated open access from day one (download it here).

I’ve been having similar conversations in several places over the last couple of weeks, which usually triggers a post. People send me a draft strategy document and say ‘what do you think?’ I take a deep breath and launch in. Half an hour later they look a bit shell-shocked, but (these are NGOs after all), always say what a useful