Advancing Good Governance in International Development

Peter John will speak about Political Turbulence as part of an upcoming seminar entitled Advancing Good Governance in International Development held at Rhodes House, University of Oxford, on 9 June 2016. The annual seminar is jointly organised by Camfed International, the Oxford Department of International Development, the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School, and Linklaters. It brings together thought leaders and practitioners from civil society, government, academia, and the private sector with the goal of facilitating dialogue on the topic of governance and how to make development more effective and sustainable.

9th June 2016

Peter John speaking at ‘I Will if You Will, Too’: Conditional Commitment in Collective Action

Political Turbulence co-author Peter John will keynote at a research workshop co-organized by King's College London, City University London, and the University of Swansea on 3 June 2016. The workshop is entitled "'I Will if You Will, Too': Conditional Commitment in Collective Action", and further details are available in the call for papers (.docx) This one day workshop convenes academics, activists and political practitioners investigating the potential and consequences of new—social and technological—participatory designs. The main focus of the meeting will be on conditional commitment, a theoretical and practical solution to the perennial collective action problem that the attainment of [...]

3rd June 2016

Talk at Harvard University

Helen Margetts will speak about Political Turbulence at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University on 2 May 2016. Full details are available on CRCS's website. How does the changing use of social media affect politics? In a recent book - Political Turbulence, Princeton University Press, 2016 - Helen Margetts and colleagues Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri show how social media are now inextricably intertwined with the political behaviour of ordinary citizens, and exert an unruly influence on the political world. As people go about their daily lives, they are invited to undertake 'tiny [...]

2nd May 2016

Talk at CRASSH, University of Cambridge

Helen Margetts will speak about Political Turbulence on 26 April 2016 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge. The talk, entitled "Social Media and Political Turbulence," will be from 14:30 to 16:30 in Room SG2, CRASSH, 7 West Road, Cambridge. Full details are available at the link below. The last few years have seen increasingly frenzied speculation about the role of social media in political mobilisation. In an important recent book Helen Margetts and her colleagues report on research drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events to show [...]

26th April 2016

Keynote at ACM Web Science Conference

Helen Margetts will speak about Political Turbulence in her keynote at the 2016 ACM Conference on Web Science in Hannover, Germany. The keynote is entitled "Understanding Political Turbulence: The Data Science of Politics," and the abstract is available in full at the link below. Social media are now inextricably intertwined with the political behaviour of ordinary citizens. As people go about their daily lives on an ever-changing cast of web-based platforms, they are invited to make 'micro-donations' of time and effort to political causes: liking, sharing, tweeting, retweeting, following, uploading, downloading, signing petitions and so on, which extend the ladder [...]

19th April 2016