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Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics
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  • Our academic themes

Our academic themes

CAPPE's rigorous intervention in the public arena aims to extend the practice of philosophy beyond its academic boundaries.

Our work falls into three key strands, identifying the academic character of our work: 

  • Social Movements and Radical Global Politics
  • Critical Theory and Radical Politics
  • Applied Philosophy

We also work within a number of ongoing themes, each of which offers a supportive academic focus for research work, outreach and collaborative activity. Details of these, together with individual contact details can be found below.

Make contact with the centre's members

CAPPE academic strands

Social Movements and Radical Global Politics 

This strand brings together emerging and established researchers working on different aspects of social movements, radical politics and protest.

Members come from sport, humanities, business, politics, sociology, media, law, geography, urban studies, criminology, international relations, and art.

Researchers host a monthly seminar series that has seen papers on social media and protest, football fan mobilisation, indigenous and peasant resistance, public space, migration, refugees, LGBTIQ activism, children rights, law and politics, covert police surveillance, Roma communities, amongst others. This seminar offers constructive critique to emerging and established scholars to develop their ideas, journal articles and research bid submissions.

The strand has resulted in a number of high profile conferences including an international conference on social movements in 2016 including a reception was hosted by the journal ‘Social Movement Studies’.

For further information please contact Francesca Burke or Deanna Dadusc.

Critical Theory and Radical Politics

The Critical Theory and Radical Politics Research Group draw on contemporary critical theoretical work, with a broadly post-foundationalist perspective.

We explore how critical theories interact with and respond to radical politics and protest. The first decades of the 21st century saw novel forms of political, artistic and spatial resistance to global order. The populist movements of Southern Europe and Latin America, global protest movements, art activists, migrants who violate territorial borders and slum dwellers who remake global cities all intervene critically to disrupt and improve their worlds. This research group develops critical theory as a uniquely interdisciplinary response to contemporary forms of radical, and often apparently marginal, political, artistic and spatial interruptions. Over the past decade we have hosted many of the world's leading critical theorists including Ernesto Laclau and Wendy Brown. We welcome members with an interest in these areas of work.

For further information contact Clare Woodford.

Applied Philosophy

CAPPE’s approach is interdisciplinary, collaborative and concerned to contribute both within the academy and beyond it.

We focus on philosophy’s contribution to public and political debate around political and moral issues. Examples include: the ethics of insurance; torture; terror; war photography; medical practice and complicity. As well as initiating research topics ourselves, we are open to suggestions from others, whether academic, activist or both. For more information, please contact Bob Brecher. 

The conference organised by the University of Brighton’s Social Movement Network was one of the most intellectually stimulating in the past years. Such a great mix of emerging and established scholars guarantees progress in our field.

Emeritus Professor Jan Willem Duyvendak (University of Amsterdam)

CAPPE academic themes

Violence

At CAPPE we ask what constitutes violence and what renders violence morally objectionable. 

Stemming from Prof Bob Brecher's 'Violence and Moral Philosophy', in ed. P. Sturmey, The Wiley Handbook of Violence and Aggression (2017), the theme sets itself the task of attempting to work through two interrelated issues that receive comparatively little explicit attention in the philosophical literature.

  • First, what constitutes violence and how does violence differ from other forms of the (ab)use of power?
  • Second, and given an adequate answer to the initial question, what is it about the exercise of violence that renders it morally objectionable (at least generally)?

So far, it has become clear that the first question is not a definitional issue; and that it is connected in complex ways with

  1. the fact that human beings are embodied and
  2. that our embodiment is a necessary condition of the exercise of rationality (to which violence may or may not be inimical).

Organised workshops and symposia help us formulate a characterisation of violence sufficiently broad but not hopelessly so on the basis of which to pursue the question of the nature of its wrongfulness.

Contact Ian Sinclair I.A.Sinclair@brighton.ac.uk

Just peace

This theme proposes ‘Just Peace’ as a critique of existing ‘Just War’ theory to examine role nonviolent means can play in preventing conflict and protecting civilians from ongoing atrocity.

We ask, what can the international community do to help protect civilians from mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity?

Existing thinking on civilian protection emphasises the use of military means, asking whether and when military intervention is justified in the name of protecting victims of atrocity.

The alternatives CAPPE proposes builds on Dr Robin Dunford and Dr Michael Neu’s collaborative work, published as Just War and the Responsibility to Protect: A Critique (Zed Books) and ‘The Responsibility to Protect in a World of Already-Existing Intervention (European Journal of International Relations), creating a research network that reflects on civilian protection from a different starting point 'Just peace'.

Building on renewed pacifist thinking and emerging work on the legitimacy and effectiveness of nonviolence, this new framework relates not only to “post” conflict settings, but also to the role nonviolent means can play in preventing conflict and protecting civilians from ongoing atrocity.

The network involves over 20 academics from Australia, New Zealand, Lebanon, the USA, Canada, Germany and the UK. 

Contact Robin Dunford.

Radical political movements

Researchers work with academics and activists across disciplinary boundaries to ask what roles social movements can and do play in society.

What roles do social movements play in society? What constitutes radicalism in contemporary politics? How is radical resistance practiced across lines of gender, race and class? And how have power holders responded to these mobilisations?

These wide-ranging questions lie at the centre of the Social Movements and Radical Politics theme, which brings together researchers and activists across disciplinary boundaries both within and beyond the University of Brighton.

Since 2014, this project has hosted a “work-in-progress” seminar series that runs through the year and provides space for close discussion of a pre-circulated paper. 

For further information please contact Francesca Burke or Deanna Dadusc.

Affordability, inequality and the experience of the private rented sector in Britain, 1938-2020

This theme investigates the causes and consequences of declining affordability in the private rented sector and assesses how tenure has contributed to deepening inequalities across lines of social class, household structure, gender, ethnicity and generational cohort.

It reanalyses household budget surveys to provide estimates of housing affordability from 1938, enabling analysis of the evolution of private rented sector across a number of different policy environments: the ad hoc solutions developed after the First World War; the social democratic settlement; the retrenchment of the 1970s; Thatcherism; New Labour; and the policy response to the financial crisis of 2008.

The research aims to benefit contemporary policymakers by helping them understand the context in which previous decisions were made and provide the evidence to evaluate a range of policy options, focusing on a case study of the city of Brighton and Hove and providing  essential evidence for local policymakers and community organisations to address the current affordability crisis in the city.

This work was developed through a series of participatory community workshops hosted by the University of Brighton in 2018 and works in collaboration with the Brighton and Hove Community Land Trust and in partnership with Brighton and Hove City Council. By hosting a series of symposiums, researchers are creating an international network of researchers working in partnership with their communities to address housing issues in their localities.

Read the Housing Forum blog.

Contact Dr Rebecca Searle

Radical Sixties

The Radical Sixties theme seeks to decentre the established Western loci of “the Sixties” from the standpoint of transnational solidarity, with and across the global south.

It builds on recent efforts to revisit, expand and complicate the spatiality and temporality of the radical sixties and calls for new analyses of this critical historical conjuncture from the standpoint of transnational solidarity, with and across the global south.

It is primarily concerned with how solidarity constituted a nodal theme for radical Left politics, anti-imperialist and anticolonial liberation struggles in the long 1960s (late 1950s to mid-1970s). In particular, researchers seek to explore how solidarity was expressed in new discursive and aesthetic modes of transnational dissent and carried through the circulatory practices of radical cultures and militant subjectivities.

An interdisciplinary approach is essential for this project’s ambition and is reflected in the participation of three of the University of Brighton's research centres: Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE); Centre for Design History (CDH); and Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories (CMNH).

Contact Dr Zeina Maasri

Gayness In queer times

Organised in collaboration with the Centre For Transforming Sexuality and Gender (CTSG), this theme seeks to reconsider the meaning and potential of ‘gay’ and ‘gayness’ in ostensibly ‘queer times’.

In contemporary scholarly work around sexuality and sexual identity, queer appears to have achieved a hegemonic status. Over the past decade the articulation of theory or politics that is explicitly gay (rather than queer or LGBTQ) has often been attached to limiting, exclusionary, and oppressive practices, particularly regarding race and gender.

As an unsurprising result, in both academia and activism ‘gay’ is frequently framed as the normative, assimilationist, and exclusionary past to queer’s fluid, radical, and inclusive present and future. Yet critically engaging with what gay and queer mean (or could mean) nowadays can be elided precisely because of this problematic juxtaposition.

While in many ways this research broadly aligns  with queer thought, it is sceptical of knee-jerk tendencies to unquestioningly surrender gay to a politics of exclusion and neoliberal assimilationism. The theme seeks to challenge and interrogate assumptions of how gay can be known and conceptualised, beyond conflation with / reduction to homosexuality. 

Contact Ian Sinclair I.A.Sinclair@brighton.ac.uk

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