Search results for ""Author Ian Taylor""

This book aims to help architects, design teams and University clients (estates departments, and academics) in their pursuit of practical and innovative solutions for the creation of enabling higher education learning environments. It includes abundant examples of solutions to design problems and advice on best practice. This book argues that investment in the higher education sector is a driver for intellectual, social and economic development, offering opportunities for positive impacts for the physical environment on the character and performance of higher education. The editor believes that good outcomes result from good design, which should address elements such as learning from best current practice, the importance of clear briefing, good environmental performance, the positive social impacts and, also, the importance of ensuring a beautiful outcome. It has chapters contributed from leading-edge practices, including case studies with highly illustrated project examples. All this is underpinned by an understanding of the practicalities of working in the sector as well as the socio-political and economic context and trends shaping future practice.

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Africa is a continent of 54 countries and over a billion people. However, despite the rich diversity of the African experience, it is striking that continuations and themes seem to be reflected across the continent, particularly south of the Sahara. Questions of underdevelopment, outside exploitation, and misrule are characteristic of many - if not most-states in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this Very Short Introduction Ian Taylor explores how politics is practiced on the African continent, considering the nature of the state in Sub-Saharan Africa and why its state structures are generally weaker than elsewhere in the world. Exploring the historical and contemporary factors which account for Africa's underdevelopment, he also analyses why some African countries suffer from high levels of political violence while others are spared. Unveilling the ways in which African state and society actually function beyond the formal institutional façade, Taylor discusses how external factors - both inherited and contemporary - act upon the continent. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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"The Flights of Zarza", published in 1992, appeared in the decade in which democratic rule returned to Argentina after seven years of brutal dictatorship and state terror, a period which Kofman, a Jew, likened to Germany before and during the Second World War. The post-dictatorship years of the late 80s were characterised by their rampant consumerism and hyper-inflation, and in an environment that was becoming more and more like a US shopping mall, poetry seemed like one of the last bastions of the 'internal voice', no longer an escape from military repression but a refuge for the literary language of a whole society. For Kofman, however, as Andrew Graham-Yooll explains in his illuminating introduction to this book, this was not the end but a new beginning, and his poetry expresses the divide between the past and the need to move on, the break of the new poetry of the 90s with the politics of the 70s.Kofman's fourth published collection is very much part of this new expression as it follows the androgynous Zarza (here a pugnacious male, there a seductive female) in his/her travels the length and breadth of Argentina and beyond. Its images are strong and colourful, its narrative vigorous, and its language direct, all of which make for an exciting first encounter, in Ian Taylor's superb translation, with this outstanding Argentinean poet.

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This edited book examines the experience of small states in Europe during the 2015–2016 migration crisis. The contributions highlight the challenges small states and the European Union faced in addressing the massive irregular flow of migrants and refugees into Europe and the Schengen Area. Small states adopted a number of coping strategies and proved relatively effective in navigating the storm they faced. Externally they pursued strategies of shelter-seeking, hiding, hedging and norm entrepreneurship, while domestically they tended to securitize migration and to pursue scapegoating by blaming the EU and other states for the nature and magnitude of the crisis. During this crisis management, their small administrations proved resilient and flexible in their responses, despite suffering from limited resources and being subject to the shifting preferences of stronger actors. This book shows that independent of whether we view the migration crisis as a crisis for the European Union or Europe as a whole, or how we interpret the intensity and severity of the crisis, this was a crisis for small states in Europe. The crisis disrupted the liberal and institutionalized order upon which small states in the region had increasingly based their policies and influence for more than 60 years.

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