Other News
Learn how can we tackle the world's most pressing problems - Effective Altruism at 桃色视频
The Effective Altruism Fellowship is an 8-week program that helps students explore how to do the most good with their careers by combining evidence, reason, and compassion to tackle global challenges—offering readings, discussions, coaching, and a vibrant community.
New Grant Success - Challenging Covert Counterterrorism Tactics
A new 拢90,000 grant will support legal action against the secretive 'Police Led Partnerships' program, exposed by PAIS鈥檚 Charlotte Heath-Kelly. The research team aims to hold UK counterterrorism policing accountable for covert surveillance through welfare and education systems.
British Academy Grant Success: 'Waves of imperialism'
A new project by PAIS鈥檚 Tom Long and Cambridge鈥檚 Carsten-Andreas Schulz dives into Chile鈥檚 1888 annexation of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to uncover surprising links between Latin American and European imperialism.
Rethinking development through more relational, embodied, and dialogic research
A new article, "Dining in the dialogical, listening through the relational: 鈥榳ithness-thinking鈥� for development scholarship and praxis", has been published in Globalizations by PAIS PhD Candidate Raymond Hyma and food researcher Dr Elaine Pratley. The piece explores their respective approaches of listening-based inquiry and food-as-method in peacebuilding and development research.
Twitter polarity and computational propaganda
How (tame) bots impact online political networks
The Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement in 2022, one of the largest protest movements in contemporary Iran, developed largely online. A collaboration between researchers from 桃色视频 (PAIS) and Tehran traces the evolution of Persian Twitter before and after the event through networks of retweets, PageRank metric and automatic clustering for community detection. The resulting maps reveal a striking transition from a polarized (pro-state versus anti-state) to a unipolar structure, in contradiction with prior studies. Further evidence from the Twitter corpus and the Iranian context suggest that this shift was influenced by computational propaganda, especially orchestrated hashtag movements. Protesters managed to quickly raise an army of bots that amplified their voice and silenced state supporters for about three months. The study contributes to understanding how Twitter/X can be used to manipulate public discourse, in Iran and beyond.
Open access article, co-authored by Philippe Blanchard (PAIS) in the .