Current and recent research projects
Democracy. Citizens and Elections research Network (DCERN)
Politics is closely allied with DCERN: a multi-disciplinary network that unites scholars at Manchester and beyond, active in the study of democracy, citizen politics and elections. Activities include an ESRC funded research seminar on the political representation of ethnic minorities.
The network examines the participation (and non-participation) of individuals and groups within the wider formal and informal context of politics. Particular expertise exists in the study of local government and community participation, deliberative democracy, electoral systems and parties, participation and the use of new media technologies. For further information vist the DCERN website or contact Rachel Gibson.
British Inter-University China Centre (BICC) and Centre for Chinese Studies
The British Inter-University China Centre (BICC) is a joint venture between Oxford, Bristol, and Manchester Universities. In 2006 it received a grant of £5m from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with the aim of making it Britain's leading centre for research and teaching on China and Chinese language. BICC is Co-Directed by William Callahan, and Elena Barabanstseva is a BICC postdoctoral fellow located within Politics at Manchester.
For further details of BICC go to its website.
Wiiliam callahan is also the Research Director of the University's Centre for Chinese Studies. For Further details of this Centre, see its website.
Institute for Political and Economic Governance (IPEG)
For more information about IPEG's research and current projects go to its website
or contact the Director of IPEG : Alan Harding
Unfree Labour
An ongoing project led by Nicola Phillips and including an ESRC funded reseearch seminar series. Research also includes a project on vulnerable workers in global production networks with case studies of forced and trafficked labour in Brazil, Ghana and India, funded by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre
Networks and Hierarchies in the Soviet Provinces
This project, led by Yoram Gorlizki and supported by a grant from the ESRC, examines the changing role of trust and of 'structures of trust' in shaping Soviet regional political networks over a 25 year period. For further details see the project's website.
Evaluating Local Governance
This five year project funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister produced its final report in 2007: 'New Council Constitutions: Outcomes and Impacts of the Local Government Act 2000' Further details are available from the IPEG website or from Francesca Gains.
Electoral Reform, Parliamentary Representation and the British MEP
A year-long research project by Professor David Farrell (Manchester) and Dr Roger Scully (Aberystwyth), sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, examining how the representative role of MEPs is affected by the electoral system used to elect them. For more information and to view the final report go to the projects's website.
Globalization, Regulatory Competition and Audiovisual Regulation in Five Countries
A three year (2005-2008) ESRC Research Projectis led by Principal Investigator Peter Humpreys and involving Professor Thomas Gibbons (in the School of Law). The research examines trends in audiovisual regulatory policies under the impact of globalization and technological change in five countries: US, Canada, France, Germany and UK. The policies of concern are those that are central to the protection and promotion of social and cultural goals in the audiovisual sector (pluralism, cultural diversity, etc.), namely: 1) public service broadcasting: and 2) the 'cultural policy toolkit' of other measures for achieving cultural policy goals, such as subsidies, quotas, media ownership rules, etc.
The Enemy That Never was: the Muslim/Turkish Minority of Thrace during the Axis occupation and the Greek Civil War, 1941-49
An AHRC funded research project led by Dimitris Papadimitriou and Kevin Featherstone, Building on newly unearthed archival material and a large number of personal testimonies, this two-year project (2006-8) addressed a gap in Balkan historiography: the position of the Muslim/Turkish minority in Western Thrace, Greece during the 1940s. The project was a collaboration between the University of Manchester and the London School of Economics (Hellenic Observatory), involving two Post-Doctoral Research Fellows, Dr. Argyris Mamarelis and Dr. George Niarchos. The project has produced a number of conference papers and public events. In 2010 a monograph on this subject will be published by Palgrave. For more details see the project’s website.
Neoliberalising Nature? A Comparative Analysis of African and Asian Elephant Based Ecotourism
This ESRC funded research project focused on one of the major theoretical debates in environmental studies: the neoliberalisation of nature. The project was carried out by Professor Rosaleen Duffy and Dr Lorraine Moore in 2008. The aim of the research was to analyse how the clean lines of theoretical models are challenged and contested by their encounter with the material realities of the nature based tourism industry in Botswana and Thailand. The project examined the complex inter-relationships between debates about the neoliberalisation of nature and the practices of the elephant-based tourism industry, specifically the use of captive elephants to allow tourists to engage in close encounters such as riding, washing, feeding elephants as well as watching them paint, play musical instruments or displaying logging skills.