Cluster researchers
Afxentis Afxentiou is a PhD candidate examining the politics and ethics of drone bombing in its historical context. His research focuses on investigating the way that drone technology operates, particularly in its surveillance, targeting and killing functions. Through this investigation, it will explore the power relations imposed by the practice of drone bombing, which does not only involve the extermination of its selected target, but also the use of such technology to record, quantify and organize the lives of the population under its gaze. In turn this research intends to critically examine the ethical defences of drones to argue that, by choosing to analyze drones as a purely quantitative phenomenon, such defences fail to consider the political and technological implications revolving around the practice of drone bombing.
| a.afxentiou@brighton.ac.uk |
Althea-Maria Rivas is a visiting research fellow from the University of Sussex who has recently completed her PhD in International Development Studies, which drew on 14 months of field work in Afghanistan and postcolonial theory to interrogate the multiple discourses and practices of the 'security development nexus' and challenged the claimed interdependence of security and development in international interventions. Her current research focuses on understanding local vernaculars and perceptions of violence in Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Andrea García González is a TECHNE funded doctoral student awarded in 2015. After her BA in Journalism, BA in Anthropology and PG courses in Gender and Communication, her master’s dissertation used an anthropological approach in order to understand the role of the women in the reconciliation process in Northern Ireland. Her current research seeks to analyse how gender dynamics in reconciliation discourse and practices in the Basque Country contribute to the rethinking of the concept of ‘reconciliation’. Co-founder of a workers’ cooperative in Madrid (Spain), she has worked as a social communicator, consultant and facilitator. Some of her publications focused on gender and education are: La coeducación en la Escuela del siglo XXI (Co-education in schools in the 21st century. Catarata. 2011), En Plano Corto: Guía para el uso del vídeo social en la educación para el desarrollo (Guide to using social video in development education. ACSUR-LAS SEGOVIAS, 2009), Clases de cine. Compartir miradas en femenino y en masculino (Cinema classes. Sharing feminine and masculine gazes. Instituto de la Mujer. 2008).
| A.GarciaGonzalez@brighton.ac.uk |
Andrew Hammond (Humanities) is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature. In both research and teaching, he has pursued interests in cross-cultural representation, twentieth-century British literature and postcolonial writing and theory. He has published some twenty articles and four books on such subjects including, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (University of Wales Press, 2007) Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (Routledge, edited 2006), and British Fiction and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
| a.n.hammond@brighton.ac.uk |
Bob Brecher (Humanities) has published widely in this area: Torture and the Ticking Bomb (London: Wiley 2007) is internationally recognised as exemplifying the approach to the application of philosophy of the cluster. Director of CAPPE, he has extensive publications in moral and political philosophy, medical ethics, focussed most recently on issues of terror and other forms of violence.
Cathy Bergin researches on racial conflict and the emergent forms of resistant identities which materialise in relation to colonial racism and white supremacism. She is particularly interested the articulations of transnational black radical politics in the US in the 20th Century which often confound tired stereotypes of the relationship between black radicalism and the Left.
Catherine Palmer (Centre for Tourism Policy Studies in Sport and Service Management) has expertise in the social anthropology of tourism, space and place, including commemorative landscapes of war and ‘dark’ tourism; and interests in the material culture of war, conflict and peace, with particular reference how tourist sites are developed, 'used' and experienced.
Darren Newbury (Humanities) is Professor of Photographic History and Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Arts. He has published widely on photography, photographic education and visual research. His most recent research has focused on the development of photography in apartheid South Africa and the re-use of historical images as a form of memorialisation in contemporary post-apartheid displays. Professor Newbury's research interests encompass the relationship between photography, history and memory, photographic and visual research methods and methodology. Within this strand he has developed a specific interest in research ethics.
| d.m.newbury@brighton.ac.uk |
Dora Carpenter-Latiri (Humanities) expertise in language, culture and identity in the Arab world and in history, memory and representations of war, conflict and revolution in North Africa and the Middle East. Research includes the utilization of photography and visual arts. Invited Fellow at Maghreb universities, and convenor of symposium and international exhibition on Arab Spring.
| d.carpenter@brighton.ac.uk |
Duncan Barron (Centre for Nursing and Midwifery Research) is a Senior Research Fellow and Patient & Public Involvement Lead for the National Institute for Health Research Design Service in the South East. His expertise is in group reminiscence work with older veterans and he is developing interests in psycho-social aspects of war remembrance and commemoration.
Eugene Michail (Humanities) is a visiting research fellow at the University of Sussex and a Humanities lecturer at the University of Brighton. He is a historian of Modern Europe, whose current research evolves around two main themes: European transnational history, focusing on how different societies contact, imagine, and affect each other politically and culturally; and the political and cultural history of south-eastern Europe, esp. Greece and the lands of the former Yugoslavia. Currently he is working on the international reactions to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, while preparing an online, collaborative project on the History of the Greek Crisis.
Fearghus Roulston is a PhD student at the University of Brighton working on an oral history project about punk music and the troubles. His MA, in journalism, was about Ulster loyalism and its anxious status in contemporary British society. He worked as a copywriter and journalist before starting the PhD.
Garikoitz Gómez Alfaro was granted the 2012 Doctoral College studentship, 'Landscapes of affect: the politics of space, place and experience', in which he explores the politics of public memory and grassroots history in the context of political violence, by looking at the spatiality (or materiality) of memory. The project draws upon two case-studies in Northern Ireland and Spain that are, in turn, located within wider, transnational frameworks in order to critically examine the underlying power relationships behind global construction of a "cosmopolitan memory" discourse. His research interests lie in popular uses of the past, critical historiographies and theories of social/cultural memory.
| g.gomezalfaro@brighton.ac.uk |
German Primera is a PhD candidate examining the the points of intersection between neoliberalism, violence and the technification of life with the production of biopolitical bodies. This research intends not only to take the politics of death to a non-juridical terrain but also to rethink the regulatory mechanisms of contemporary biopolitics in terms of theintrinsic politisation of death that they imply.
Graham Dawson (Humanities) is Director of the Centre for Research in Memory and Narrative Histories (CRMNH) and internationally recognised as a leading researcher on war memory and the culture of conflict transformation, with particular expertise in the Northern Ireland conflict and its legacies. His current research addresses questions of memory, story-telling and subjectivity in relation to imaginative geography, historical justice and ‘reconciliation’ in post-conflict spaces.
Hillary Megan Kipnis is a qualified attorney from the US with a background in international law, politics and conflict and security studies. Currently, she is a Phd. candidate within the School of Sport and Service Management researching the gendered nature of war and occupation as experienced by sportswomen in Palestine. This inter-disciplinary and unique project will bring to the spotlight women’s role in resistance, politics and sport in Palestine.
Ian Cantoni is a PhD candidate in the Humanities who has been awarded the 2014 TECHNE scholarship. He has an interdisciplinary background, completing his undergraduate studies in Philosophy and French at the University of Manchester and his MA in History at Bristol University.
Ian’s current research concentrates on the relationship between memory of the Second World War and decolonisation in contemporary France. His project is site-based, focusing on the Rivesaltes Memorial Museum, a site of internment throughout the 20th Century. Drawing on methods from a wide range of disciplines, Ian interrogates how the museum conveys the interlocking histories and memories of Vichy, the Holocaust and the Algerian War and how this impacts upon French identity today. Through archival research, participant observation and interviews Ian will develop an understanding of how interpretations of past conflict, internment and the Other impact upon present discourse in French society.
Ian Sinclair is a PhD student in the School of Humanities whose research concerns the concepts of equality and difference. More broadly, he is interested in moral philosophy and political theory, as well as post-Marxism, post-structuralism, and sexuality. He is currently the Administrator for the Understanding Conflict Research Cluster.
| i.a.sinclair@brighton.ac.uk |
James O'Leary is an architect and PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, where he is the recipient of the 2014 AHRC TECHNE Doctoral Studentship. His research aims to establish new modes of architectural representation and proposition conducive to working in politically contested post-conflict architectural sites. Focusing on the 'Interface Areas' that separate Nationalist and Unionist communities in Belfast, he is undertaking a practical and theoretical investigation into the architect's role in the transformation of blighted urban areas that have been neglected through the course of political conflict.
His doctoral research is documented online at: http://www.peacewall-archive.net
Jelena Timotijevic (Humanities) is a Principal Lecturer in Linguistics with a background in philosophy of language and Contextualism, a theoretical approach that focuses on an inferential model of communication. Her research stretches across two strands. The first attempts to link elements of a Contextualist approach to meaning and use with Marxist philosophy of language. The second strand focuses on applications of an analytical framework within Critical Language Research, which examines manifestations of discourse in various contexts. Here too Dr Timotijevic situates her analysis within a Marxist tradition. The specific discourse(s) she works on are: discourse of conflict, and nationalism, in Yugoslavia as a communist state and as a post-communist transformation state; discourse of 'normalisation' in the Palestine/Israel conflict; and discourse of political protest and civil (dis)order.
| J.Timotijevic@brighton.ac.uk |
John Sugden (Sports and Service Management) is a professor of the sociology of sport, who has researched and written widely on the topics concerned with the politics of sport. He is well known for his work on sport and peace building in divided societies; his books on international boxing and on sport in Northern Ireland have won national and international awards.
Juliet Millican (Economic and Social Engagement) is deputy director (academic) of the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP) at The University of Brighton. She has been developing student community engagement programmes at the university since 2004, where she runs a post-graduate certificate in Community Engagement. She manages student community research and works strategically to introduce engaged learning across the curriculum and was instrumental in organising a pan African conference on community engagement in Dakar, Senegal. Her research interests include the transformative potential of community based learning and the role of higher education in post conflict recovery, her doctoral research focused on a divided community in the Balkans.
Kasia Tomasiewicz is a PhD student whose work critically engages with the evolution of display and audience interpretation of Second World War galleries at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) since 1945. Changes in museology pedagogy and practice in our national museum of war will be mapped alongside shifting dominant political and cultural landscapes. These shifts will be used to unpick how public memory and commemoration of the Second World War have been formed.
| K.Tomasiewicz@brighton.ac.uk |
Leila Dawney (Environment and Technology) has expertise in cultural geography, ethnographic methodologies and ‘new materialist’ theory; currently working on the commemoration, memorialisation and soldiers’ bodies in British military landscapes. She is developing relationships with community partners to explore ‘spaces and aesthetics of authority’ with particular reference to military bodies/spaces (AHRC research networking fund).
Lisa Hardie was granted the 2013 PhD studentship, 'Memorial landscapes: Negotiating post-conflict spaces', in which she will research the emotional and affectual geographies of New Zealand tourists when they visit the commemorative WWI sites in Gallipoli, Turkey. Through this case study she will apply Foucault's concept of 'heterotopia' to investigate feelings of belonging and (dis)connection, and how tourists' embodied experiences in the memorial landscape related to cultural memory and national identity.
Louise Purbrick (Humanities) is principal lecturer in the history of art and design. She works on the material culture of conflict, often in collaboration with archaeologists, photographers and community activists. She has published a number of works on sites of exploitation and imprisonment in Northern Ireland and Chile. She is currently completing AHRC-funded research on the Traces of Nitrate project.
Lucy ‘Kate’ Newby was granted a full-time TECHNE/AHRC-funded doctoral studentship in 2015. Her current research is an oral history project on the dynamics of trans-generational memory in post-conflict Belfast. The project employs an inter-disciplinary framework to explore youthful experiences of the Troubles in Belfast, whilst examining their psychic, emotional, cultural and socio-political legacies for individuals and communities in the present.
Lucy Noakes (Humanities) is co-founder of the Centre for Research in Memory and Narrative Histories (CRMNH) and a senior researcher whose work focuses on the relationship between the social and cultural history of war and the cultural memory of warfare in postwar societies. She is Co_Investigator on the AHRC Gateways to the First World War project and the holder (with Susan R. Grayzel) of a Collaborative Fellowship Award from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her current research projects explore the impact of wartime death on the psychic, geographic and cultural landscapes of post-WWII Britain, and the relationship between gender, civil defence and citizenship in 20th century Britain. She is Series Editor for the Social History Society book series, New Directions in Social and Cultural History (Bloomsbury) and recent publications include British Cultural Memory of the Second World War (edited with Juliette Pattinson, Bloomsbury: 2013)
Marie-Benedicte Dembour (Business School) is Professor of Law and Anthropology. She has been working on human rights for over 20 years. Her article ‘What are human rights? Four schools of thought’ (2010) is amongst Human Rights Quarterly’s most downloaded. With the support of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, she recently completed the monograph When Humans Become Migrants (Oxford University Press, 2015). This is in some ways a sequel to her previous book Who Believes in Human Rights? (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Her early work dealt with colonialism in the Congo and Sharia law in the Sudan.
Marina Novelli (Sport and Service Management) is a reader in tourism and international development, with a background in economics and geography and an interest in development studies applied to tourism. Specialising in tourism and development in Sub-Sahara Africa she has undertaken applied research in 15 Sub-Sahara Africa destinations, some of which affected by the complex post-conflict restructuring process. She is currently writing monograph to be published by Routledge entitled Tourism and Development in Sub-Sahara Africa. She is editor-in-chief of the Sage journal Tourism and Hospitality Research.
Mark Devenney (Humanities) is a senior researcher with expertise in critical theory and contemporary continental philosophy. Concerned with the impact of varying forms of violent conflict on individuals and communities, his current research focuses on the politics and ethics of suicide bombing, the ‘war on terror’ and the uses of political violence.
Melina Sadikovic is a PhD candidate in the College of Arts and Humanities researching ways of coming to terms with past collective violence and war atrocities, focusing on the manner in which such processes shape individual and collective memory and identity/ies. Her research will centre on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovine.
| m.sadikovic@brighton.ac.uk |
Michael Neu (Humanities) is an early career researcher with expertise in humanitarian intervention and Just War Theory and a developing interest in the politics of applied ethics. He has worked on political violence and torture and runs the MANCEPT workshop on Dirty Hands in Politics.
Mike Diboll's research is in the post-2011 transformation in the Arab world, and the generational, gender and social class factors in relation to the emergency of the "2011 generation". This interest derives from his ten-year residency in the Arabic-speaking Middle East 2001-11, during which he worked in the comparative Humanities and higher education development. Mike as an eye-witness to the 2011 Bahrain revolution, and the subsequent counter-revolution, in which the trans-Atlantic West was complicit. Interested in the generational and educational drivers of social change in the region, and the weaponisation of psychological trauma as a repressive strategy to counter the emergence of the 'new Arabs', he is a doctoral candidate at Heath Sciences at the University of Brighton (his 2001 doctorate was in the comparative Western and Arabic literatures of decolonisation). Mike is Visiting Research Associate with the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.
Nicola Clewer is a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton where she also teaches on the School of Humanities BA Humanities and MA Cultural and Critical Theory programmes. She recently co-edited a volume of collected wroks: Chiara Certomá, Nicola Clewer and Doug Elsey (eds.) The Politics of Space and Place, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2012)
Paul Evans is exploring the concept of ‘dirty hands’ - the alleged need to sometimes do the wrong thing in order to do right, and the implications using this concept to explain and justify the use of state violence. His research questions the relationship between politics and ethics, asking whether the use of violence can be ethical, while considering the moral status of those in positions of political authority that sanction violence.
Paul Hopper (Humanities) is a senior researcher working on globalization and with interests in conflict and security studies. He has written on al-Qaeda, Islam and the West and the geopolitical and security impact of the rise of China: current research focuses on relationships between environmental decline and security, and contemporary patterns of conflict.
Peter Squires (Applied Social Science) has been researching firearm violence, 'gun culture' and gun control for 20 years, initially from a criminological and sociological perspective, but more recently developing an analysis of the dissemination of 'global gun culture' and community weaponisation as a vector in the development of neoliberalism. His first book, Gun Culture or Gun Control? (2000) compared British and American responses to mass shooting outrages while Shooting to Kill? (2010) explored the use of lethal force and the development of police armed response capacity. His most recent book Gun Crime in Global Contexts (2014) sought to develop an interdisciplinary approach to weaponisation and gun violence and a theoretical framework for understanding the relationships between weaponisation and neoliberalism.
| p.a.squires@brighton.ac.uk |
Rebecca Searle (Humanities) is a historian with a particular interest in the relationship between the experience and representation of aerial violence. Her monograph, Britain can paint it! art, propaganda and the experience of Aerial Warfare 1939-45, examines this relationship by considering the ways in which British artists dealt with the legacy of he violence of the Second World War in the immediate postwar period. She is also interested in the role of air power in the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century.
Robin Dunford is a senior lecturer in globalisation and war. His interest in conflict falls into two main areas. First, he is interested in exploring the links between 'land grabbing' and violent forms of conflict, and is interested in exploring the ways in which resistance to land grabbing and democratic control over land and territory can help avoid conflict in the long-term. Second, together with Dr Michael Neu, he is working on a book length critical analysis of defences of 'Just' and 'Humanitarian' forms of warfare.
Sam Carroll has a particular research interest in British anti-war protest campaigns, memory and life history. Her doctoral thesis focused on the Committee of 100, an anti-nuclear protest group designed to promote mass non-violent direct action in order to push for governmental changes in defence policy. Publications include “'Danger Official Secrets' and The Spies for Peace: Discretion and Disclosure in the Committee of 100”, History Workshop Journal, Issue 69 (2010), 'Brighton Women's Peace Camp 1983, Second Wave Feminism and the Women's Peace Movement'. Sussex On-Line Journal of Contemporary History. Winter Edition (2005) and “'I was arrested at Greenham in 1962': Investigating the oral narratives of women in the Committee of 100. 1962-1968”, Oral History, Spring Edition (2004). She is currently the administrator for the Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton.
Struan Gray is a PhD candidate examining the role of film in constructing and contesting cultural memory of the Chilean military dictatorship. After completing a BA in Journalism, Film and Media at Cardiff University, he went on to work as a journalist for the Santiago Times in Chile. This period sparked an interest in the societal legacies of violent state repression, as well as the cultural strategies through which they are interrogated and obscured. His current work focusses specifically on the significance of sites and spaces of past violence in Chile, examining the how film might offer alternative imaginative geographies of repression and resistance throughout the transition to democracy.
Thomas Carter (Sport and Service Management) has expertise in cultural history and memories of revolutionary and emergent post-revolutionary Cuba, addressing memories and narratives of celebration, loss, and movement, focusing on the changing urban fabric of Havana and negotiations over Cuban identity.
Tim Huzar is a PhD candidate researching the convergence of biopolitical violence and sovereign force central (but not unique) to the phenomenon of neoliberalism. Focusing on two case studies - the ‘shock and awe’ tactics employed by the United States military at the beginning of the 2003 Iraq War, and the tactic of ‘total policing’ employed by the London Metropolitan Police Service from 2011 onwards - he will critically examine the rationale for the use of violence in moments of conflict, encompassing both the intended and unintended consequences of violence.
Vicky Johnson (Education) leads research with marginalised children and young people in conflict and post conflict countries. For example, in Kenya UNGEI-funded research identifies subjective wellbeing indicators from perspectives of street connected girls and resources developed for the Bernard van Leer Foundation on engaging young children in research includes case studies from Ethiopia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Peru, Nepal and China (Tibet). Vicky has conducted extensive research in Nepal pre and post civil conflict over the past decades of Maoist insurgency. Her most recent research in Nepal was for the International Planned Parenthood Federation on the realisation of youth sexual rights across global contexts.
| vicky.johnson@brighton.ac.uk |
Vicky Margree (Humanities) specialises in the Gothic literary tradition and the ghost story and developing research on themes of haunting, the uncanny and unresolved pasts. She has particular interests in the post–Apartheid literature of South Africa.
Xavier Ribas is a part-time Senior Lecturer in Photography. His research interests include contested landscapes, border territories and the contemporary city. He has published five monographs of his work: Sundays (1998), Sanctuary (2005), Nomads (2012), Ceuta and Melilla Border Fences (2012) and Nitrate (2014). His most recent work Nitrate (2014) is part of the AHRC-funded collaborative research project Traces of Nitrate. Mining History and Photography Between Chile and Britain (1870s–1920s), developed at the University of Brighton with colleague historian Louise Pubrick and Chilean photographer/PhD student Ignacio Acosta. Nitrate has been exhibited at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and will tour to The Bluecoat in Liverpool (April 2015) and the Museo Universidad de Navarra, Spain (October 2015).
Xenia Carvalho is an anthropologist and PhD candidate within the University of Brighton's Education Research Centre (ERC), where she is exploring the construction of knowledge in post-colonial societies, namely over three generations of Mozambicans. Since 1992 Xeina has carried out ethnographic fieldwork investigating death rituals and descriptions of the afterlife within the Islamic community around Portugal. Previously Xenia was a lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique), before which she was a senior social and political advisor at PCM (Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Portugal).
Zeina Maasri is a PhD candidate interested in the intersection of politics with the visual and material culture of 1960s-70s Middle East. Zeina has completed a research project on Lebanon's wartime posters (1975-90) which resulted in a book Off The Wall (London: IB Tauris, 2009), related exhibitions and a website, Signs of Conflict, including an annotated digital archive of political posters.
Peter Morgan is a PhD candidate who researches on British understandings and representations of the mass killing of civilians in the first three decades of the last century, although it may remain concentrated on the Armenian massacres of 1915-16. Genocide before genocide as it were and looking at whether and to what extent conceptualisations of mass violence against civilians were moving in that direction. As such therefore, I believe I could contribute usefully to the work of the cluster with regard to how narratives and memories of violence are constructed as well as their long term legacy.
