Who we are

Matthew is a Principal Lecturer in Psychology and Chartered Psychologist. His research has focused on the role of natural environments in mental health and wellbeing; our relationships with animals and the natural world; and how we experience and make sense of climate and ecological crisis. He works with a range of qualitative and arts-based research methods, including visual and comics-based research. 

Tilo Amhoff is interested in the social, economic, and political conditions of the social labour process of the production of architecture and the built environment, especially its regulatory frameworks and its relations of production, such as the relation between the intellectual work of planning and the manual work of building. He is currently working on the manuscript for a book entitled The making of plans: Germany, 1862- 1932, which explores architectural, urban, and economic plans, and searches for the beginnings of the plan as instrument and product of regulation, organisation, and administration. Tilo Amhoff has a lasting interest in the written legal and technical documents architects produce and use, which started with his research of the transformations of building contracts, including legal obligations, building specifications, and working drawings, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in England. His most recent project explores the agenda and challenge of Marxist architectural history and theory in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the context of the student movement, and a vital reminder of a time in which students were the producers of their education, critiquing the education they were presented with and independently developing alternative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary modes of learning.

Dr Harriet Atkinson is a historian of art and design, with experience in filmmaking, curating, policymaking and grantgiving. Harriet was a founder member of the Centre for Design History, where she co-leads the Design Activism research strand. She is Course Leader for University of Brighton's MA Curating Collections and Heritage, run with Brighton & Hove Museums.

Harriet's research interests include art, design and dress for propaganda, protest, resistance, dissent and solidarity; government engagements with art and design; and histories of exhibitions and world's fairs.

Current research:

Graphic Design Histories for Creative Dissent: Archiving and Ethical Challenges Until December 2027, Harriet is part of the team for the Trans-Atlantic Platform project Graphic Design Histories for Creative Dissent: Archiving and Ethical Challenges, which focuses on protest graphics across Brazil, South Africa and the UK, from 1950 to the present. The project is funded through FAPESP, NRF and UKRI. Collaborators include Prof Teal Triggs, Royal College of Art (PI); Dr Tai Cossich, Brighton; Assoc Prof Priscila Farias, University of São Paulo; Asst Prof Guilherme Altmayer, University of São Paulo; Assoc Prof Deirdre Pretorius, University of Johannesburg; Dr Thandi Gamedze, University of the Western Cape; and Assoc Prof Lee-Shae Sharnick-Udemans, University of the Western Cape. As part of the project, Harriet is in the pre-production phase of co-directing a project documentary, in collaboration with filmmaker Jane Dibblin.

Decolonising the Archive: creating an archive for impactful policy-making In 2025, Harriet collaborated with curator and cultural strategist Clare Cumberlidge, artist and archivist Êvar Huseynî and youth organisers The Advocacy Academy on the Research England-funded project Decolonising the Archive: creating an archive for impactful policy-making and the linked Royal College of Art-led project Radical Archiving for Change.

UK government participation at Osaka Expo 2025 Harriet was commissioned by Department for Business and Trade to write an independent report evaluating the design and development of the UK Pavilion at Osaka Expo 2025, delivered in January 2026.

Designing from Home (2025), which Harriet co-directed with Sue Breakell, produced by Banyak Films, is about the North London house of graphic designer F.H.K. Henrion, a family home and the office for an expanding design practice for over more than forty years. Read a feature about Harriet's filmmaking in Camden New Journal here (p.20-1). The film will be showing at the London Independent Film Festival 2026. Watch the trailer here.

Lost and Found: the biography of a photo album Harriet is writing a new book, exploring personal photographs and the politics of memory, reflections sparked by a family album compiled by her artist grandmother Rachel Carnegie (1901-1997) and returned to Harriet by a stranger who had bought it on eBay.

Recent research:

The Materialisation of Persuasion From 2019-23, Harriet was Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow and Principal Investigator leading the project '"The Materialisation of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953'.

This resulted in:

* the book Showing resistance: propaganda and Modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 (Manchester University Press, 2024), published Open Access and available to download here, winner of the 2026 Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period 1800-1960.

* a chapter for co-edited book British Writing, Propaganda, and Cultural Diplomacy in the Second World War and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2024)

* a chapter for co-edited book Exhibition as Interior, Interior as Exhibition: Spaces of Display within and beyond the Museum and Gallery (Bloomsbury, 2025)

* the co-edited book Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges Through Art, Architecture and Design from 1945, with Dr Verity Clarkson and Dr Sarah Lichtman (Bloomsbury, 2022)

* an article about Misha Black's networks through exhibitions (Journal of Design History, 2021)

* podcast series Graphic Interventions (available on ITunes and Spotify)

* the documentary film Art on the Streets (2023), co-directed with filmmaker Jane Dibblin, narrated by Michael Rosen and made with film charity Four Corners. The film has screened in Berlin, Porto, Izmir, San Francisco and beyond. Until March 2026, it is screened daily at Tate Britain in the exhibition Artists International Association: the first decade. View the film's trailer here.

Cultural historian Professor Joanna Bourke described Art on the Streets as: ‘A documentary for our times. Aesthetically beautiful, politically gripping, and inspiring', while Financial Times Architecture and Design critic Edwin Heathcote described it as 'a life-affirming view of the capacity of art and design to provide hope in the darkest circumstances'.

The film has garnered several awards and nominations at international film festivals including: Finalist, London Director Awards 2025; Nominee, Learning on Screen Awards 2024; Official selection, Festival Internacional de Cine de la No-Violencia Activa (FICNOVA), 2024; Winner, 'Best Documentary Short', Luleå International Film Festival Sweden 2023; Winner, 'Best Documentary for Peace', Bridge of Peace Film Awards 2023; Winner, 'Best Documentary Short', California International Shorts Festival 2023; Finalist, 'Best Short Documentary', New York International Film Awards 2023; Finalist, Berlin International Art Film Festival 2023; Official Selection, Berlin Women Cinema Festival 2023; Official Selection, Miami Women Film Festival 2023; Official Selection, LA Independent Women Film Awards 2023; Official Selection, Cinecity Brighton Film Festival 2023; Nominee, Tokyo International Cinema Awards 2023; Official Selection, History Arts and Sciences International Doc Fest 2023. 

My research interests have evolved and will continue to do so over the years. My PhD at the University of Sussex was about everyday memory in people living with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and how it changes over time. The aim was to inform the development of strategies that would support memory in people living with AD. I then undertook a Dementia Research Fellowship at Brighton & Sussex Medical School, where I carried out a number of research projects involved with older adults living with dementia. One study was an international, collaborative study of dementia attitudes, beliefs and experiences of people in Pakistan. In other research I focused on the lifestyle risk factors of AD, including loneliness and poor sleep. My study on night-to-night sleep in people with Alzheimer's disease was a unique documentation of how sleep quality can affect day-to-day cognition, mood and behaviour (Balouch et al., 2022). This research has sparked my fascination of the interplay between sleep and every aspect of waking life (e.g. cognitive ability, mood, health and behaviour), leading to a desire to continue this work in the future.

My research interests are centred upon the overlap between sociology and philosophy, and in particular focus on four areas. firstly, I research the philosophy of social science, the sociology of knowledge, the epistemological status of sociology, and sociology's relationship with philosophy and legal theory. Secondly, I am interested in theories of rationality, and the role of value judgements and ethical propositions in sociological theory. Thirdly, my work also focusses on sociological theory, both classical and modern, and in particular, Marxist and Weberian sociological theory. Fourthly, and related to this, I also work on class and stratification, and their relationship to sociological conceptions of power, ideology, and conceptions of domination and authority.

My DPhil entitled 'Alan Gewirth and the Political Community' was awarded in 2003, and attempted to establish the importance of ethical theory to Marx's political theory. In order to do this, I argued that Marx's theory of human nature, or species-being needs to be underpinned by Alan Gewirth's neo-Kantian ethical rationalism argument encapsulated in his argument to a supreme moral principle. Put another way, his conception of a Prospective Purposive Agent, a being who values not only his or her purposes, but also the generic preconditins of agency (freedom and well-being) is the necessary foundation for Marx's theory of human nature. 

Since then, I have written and published on Gewirth and Marx, as well as legal theory, theories of power, and the works of Max Weber, Ralf Dahrenorf, Jurgen Habermas, and Steven Lukes.

My research interests are centred on politics and international relations in the Middle East and, in this regional context, in particular on: activism in repressive contexts; student movements and the political role of universities; and transnational solidarity.

1.       Activism in repressive contexts

I am particularly interested in how people pursue activism in contexts of extreme repression, including under military occupation. This work intersects with my broader interest on social movements and mobilisation. As part of this research interest, I have published on Palestinian political activism under occupation, including resistance practiced by university students (in Resistance and the Practice of Rationality) and through cultural institutions. My article for Critical Military Studies explores the activism at work in the Palestinian Museum and contributes to emerging academic work that seeks to highlight the role of museums in International Relations.

2.       Student movements and the political role of universities

I have a long-standing research interest in student activism. My doctoral thesis (which was awarded the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) focused on Palestinian student activism in Palestinian, Israeli and British universities. I subsequently led the British Academy funded project in Higher Education and Political Change in the Arab World which focused on the teaching of social sciences at Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian universities in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, and the political setting and impact of this teaching. Together with Juliet Millican, I have published work on the role of universities and students in conflict and post-conflict situations and under occupation.

3.       Transnational Solidarity

My research interest in transnational solidarity is currently being pursued through the on-going Radical Sixties project that seeks to bring transnational solidarity (particularly across, and with, anticolonial struggles) to the fore in analyses of politics in the 1960s. Beginning with the 2019 international conference ‘The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politic and Histories of Solidarity’ held at the University of Brighton, the project has continued through a 2020 workshop on radical politics and transnational solidarity in the “Long Sixties”. I have recently co-edited a book, with Dr Zeina Maasri and Dr Cathy Bergin, Transnational solidarity: Anticolonialism in the global sixties (Manchester University Press, 2022), based on papers developed from these events with other selected contributors.

My background is in the field of Social Psychology and my own research involves the study of groups, falling into two main areas: crowd behaviour and collective resilience.

My main body of interest is explaining how people behave in crowds and I am part of a group of Social Psychologists who seem to spend a lot of their time overcoming the classic myths associated with collectives, as crowds often behave much better than they are usually given credit for! My own particular area of interest is mass emergency behaviour and how this influences disaster planning and response guidelines. What we are increasingly finding is that communities affected by emergencies are often much more resilient to adversity than was previously expected, and this has profound implications for emergency policy and planning. I have applied what we know about emergency behaviour to the COVID-19 pandemic, and explored community mutual aid and social support in the South East during the lockdown March- May 2020. Following on from this, I am also interested in looking at how people can come together if they have a shared experience of adversity, and how this collective resilience might also help mitigate the effects of exposure to stress. I have explored the emergence of collective resilience in a variety of diverse groups, such as Nurses, Paramedics, and young people dealing with the everyday stresses of growing up.

Now that crowd events have re-emerged post COVID restrictions, I have begun looking at the biggest wave of public protests we have seen in a generation, such as the anti-war protests from 2023 onwards, and the August 2024 riots and community responses. My current research plans are to explore this area further.

My publications explore the way that social, political, and economic questions are played out through various kinds of cultural representations and practices including modern and contemporary writing in English, and in visual cultures of the late twentieth and twenty-first century.

I am currently a Co-Investigator on the Horizon 2020 grant, CAPONEU- Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe. Working with colleagues in the University of Brighton's CAPPE, I am investigating the nature of the political with a particular focus on the political work of the novel as a form or writing. My current project aims to develop a typology of politics reading across into the contemporary political novel in English. This project will suggest that the contemporary political novel differs from previous understandings of this form and will demonstrate how different defintions of politics get treated by contemporary novelists.

My recent research has focused on the economic humanities, specifically around questions of work and literature. This includes my book Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel (Palgrave,  2017) which explores how regimes of flexible labour in the contemporary economy have been represented in English-language fiction about office work. It explores a range of national contexts in order to consider how the different national traditions for thinking about work inform recent depictions of precarious workers. Building on this research, I have recent essays on women's novels depicting office and flexible work, demonstrating how these engage with feminist debates about the nature of paid or unpaid labour, and on surrogate-thrillers exploring how commercial surrogacy is represented as care work in recent film and television.

My previous research has focused on the relationships of cultural texts to nations and transnational movements. I have published widely on the idea of the nation and on the culture of globalization. This research considers how changes in public discourses are reproduced and challenged by creative and cultural texts. This has concentrated on ideas about national and racial difference; on the shape of the global economy since the late 1970s; and on contemporary attitudes towards terror. I have published extensively on  literature and globalization and this work has helped to shape the debates defining this field. In 2010 I co-edited the Literature and Globalization Reader (Routledge) which, for the first time, brought together major theoretical writings on globalization with critical responses to these theories in literary studies. 

I write about and research contemporary critical theories and radical politics. This includes work in continental philosophy, populism, radical forms of politics and protest, discourse theory and deconstruction and the politics of inequality.

Robin Dunford's research addresses humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect, human rights, and decolonial ethics.

 1.     Civilian Protection, Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect

With Michael Neu (University of Brighton), Dunford is the author of Just War and the Responsibility to Protect: A Critique. This book argues that debates on Just War and the Responsibility to Protect fail to consider already existing forms of intervention – including arms trading, attempts to stoke ethnic tension, and measures that destroy the environment – that contribute to the emergence of humanitarian crises including genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. 

2.     Human Rights and the Politics of Resistance

Dunford has written on social movement claims for human rights, focusing in particular on recent moves towards a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. Through a series of articles and a monograph entitled The Politics of Transnational Peasant Struggle, he has called for greater recognition within the Human Rights Council of the new collective rights demanded by activists. 

 3.     Decolonial  Ethics

The third project shows how a Decolonial ethics centred on the idea of ‘pluriversality’ – a world in which many worlds fit – offers a persuasive alternative to the cosmopolitan perspective that sits at the centre of contemporary Global Ethics. Having outlined central features of a decolonial global ethics in an article in the Journal of Global Ethics, Dunford is now exploring how a decolonial perspective can reframe debates concerning environmental ethics, food justice, and development ethics.

 4. Law, Ethics and Democracy

With Dr Lara Montesinos Coleman, Dunford co-ordinates the Law, Ethics and Democracy Collective: an action-research initiative between scholars at the Universities of Brighton and Sussex. The Project, which was founded in 2016, aims to bring together work in applied philosophy and political theory with struggles against the increasingly fascistic, anti-democratic and dubiously-legal forms of economy and government we encounter today. 

Additional Roles: 

Together with Professor Professor Bob Brecher and Dr Michael Neu, Dunford edits a book series with Rowman and Littlefield. Off the Fence: Morality, Politics, Society publishes short, sharply argued texts in applied moral and political philosophy, with an interdisciplinary focus. Robin is also co-convenor of the British International Studies Association's Ethics and World Politics working group.

My research interests focus on critical theory, and political and moral philosophy with a particular emphasis on the work of Theodor Adorno and Judith Butler.

My PhD comprised a critical intervention in the recent ‘turn to ethics’ in post-foundational philosophy, principally in the work of Judith Butler. The project reworked Butler’s theorisation of precarity with recourse to Adorno’s critique of morality. Re-reading Adorno’s work pushes Butler’s account of ethical life to address the implication of our relation to objects in any ethics. The thesis concludes that an ethics beginning with the primacy of the object, undoes distinctions that constrain both thought and action. This notion of ethical life extends beyond Adorno's framework, placing humans in a proliferation of relations to objects that are themselves perceived as a multiplicity of becomings. This proliferation surpasses the constraints that define the terms upon which domination is built.

My current research develops these arguments in relation to debates regarding human/non-human relations, critical ecology and the climate crisis, examining the colonial production of hierarchies of life and their ecological consequences.

Emma-Louise Jay is an existential psychologist whose research interests intersect across psychological medicine and philosophy. She wrote her mixed-methods PhD on depersonalization at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London after completing her MSc. in the Philosophy of Mental Disorder at the same university writing her thesis on the same syndrome.

From 2013 – 2021 Emma lived and worked in Colombia where she took on the role of as post-doctoral psychologist at a leading creative arts university in Medellín – La Colegiatura Colombiana. There she co-developed a research centre focusing on research projects relating to the science of creativity, how we understand identification, and efforts towards developing social leader-led peace efforts in Colombia in the context of the 2016 Colombian peace accord. She also authored an imaginative blog which focused mainly on issues relating to the Colombian political climate.

At the University of Brighton, Emma has led module SS572 on Key Theoretical Foundations to Counselling and Psychotherapy since 2021. In this role she enjoys teaching about the many different schools that inform the field of psychotherapy and counselling studies. Despite being drawn to the existential and analytic psychotherapy traditions, she would like to broaden awareness of lesser-known therapies such as ‘Morita therapy’, ‘Logotherapy’ and 'Milton H. Ericksonian' hypnotherapy in her UK teaching. Emma was also Course Leader for the (Applied) Psychology program from 2021-2024. 

Emma has been the Research Ethics and Integrity Lead (REIL) for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Brighton since 2023 where she supports staff and students to gain ethical approval to conduct their research safely and inclusively. 

Emma’s research interests include existential psychology and psychotherapy, phenomenology, spiritual and religious experience, German idealism, dissociation, psychological medicine, critical psychology, psychoanalysis, hypnotherapy, the history of psychiatry, cross-cultural psychology and psychology in armed conflict contexts, particularly Colombia. She is the author of many peer-reviewed articles, a blog, and narrative non-fiction. She is currently dipping her toe into autoethnography.

Language(s):

Emma is bilingual (English and Spanish).

Affiliations:

The University of Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE).

Prospective Doctoral students:

Emma currently has two PhD students (one researching climate populism in Brasil and one looking at cosmopolitanism through a critical neurodivergent lens). She would like to take on doctoral research students who share her research interests, and especially interdisciplinary researchers working across disciplines.

My primary research focus is in the field of critical political economy. I am interested in how transitions from capitalism might occur, and what those systems might look like. This is informed by elements of anarchist and Marxist theory as well as Frankfurt School critical theory. I have published on the experience of work in worker co-operatives, the potential of co-operatives as transitional forms of post-capitalist economy, and the ecological potential worker ownership. 

I am further interseted in critically considering the role of technology and social media in creating and maintaining economic subjectivities. This informs a current research project on conspiracy theories and 'pseudolaw'.

As a secondary research focus, I have an interest in British politics, considering the interrelated nature of complex governance, statecraft approaches, and Marxist theory.

Craig Jordan-Baker is interested in the literary representation of landscape, place and nature and is currently co-editing (with Dr Philippa Holloway) Writing Landscape and Setting in the Anthropocene - Britain and Beyond (Palgrave). He writes about these subjects in both his academic and literary work. His first novel, The Nacullians (Epoque press) was published in 2020 and has been described by the Irish Times as 'a multi-layered treatise on memory and the stories we tell ourselves'. His second book, If the River is Hidden (Epoque press) is a collaborative hybrid-text written with poet and academic Dr Cherry Smyth and concerns their walk along Northern Ireland’s longest river, the Bann.

I am a critical and cultural theorist who employs psychoanalytic thinking to theorise the interrelation of social and symbolic change, with a particular interest in the philosophy, theory, politics and aesthetics of social reproduction and care. In my monograph, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care, published in the Palgrave Macmillan series, Studies in the Psychosocial, in 2022, I investigated what the work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott can contribute to understanding, as well as addressing, the crisis of care at the heart of contemporary society. My more recent work and current projects explore the relationship between psychoanalytic thinking and social and symbolic change, centring feminist, queer and decolonial perspectives.

More broadly, my research foregrounds the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and society. I explore psychoanalytic thinking as a critical discourse in the Humanities, and as both a product, and active agent, of social and cultural change. I am concerned with the relationship between psychoanalysis, as theory and practice, and social justice; the politics of mental health; and the politics of reproduction and care. Theoretically, my work draws on a range of psychoanalytic perspectives, including Freudian, Lacanian, object relational and Laplanchian approaches, as well as Critical Theory; feminist theory; gender studies; queer theory and cultural studies. Much of my research to date has explored the knots that bind psychoanalytic thinking to cultural practices and social processes.

I am Course Leader for the BA(Hons) Politics, Sexuality and Gender, for which I led the design and successful validation. I'm a member of the Management Board for the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at Brighton, where I contribute to several themes, including 'The Politics of Reproduction' and 'Political Fictions.'

Andy Knott works in political theory, with a specific interest in political subjects, especially individualism and the people of populism, as well as debates across contemporary democratic theory.

Current research is focused on populism, with an interest in drawing on theoretical, historical and contemporary accounts of this complex political phenomenon. Recent projects have involved: the thorny question of defining populism; analysing populism's beginnings and temporality; left-wing populisms; the theories of populism; Brexit, populism and conservatism; and, populism and political subjects.

Andy is currently working on the notions of left and right, in order to re-think these categories, and reject the notion of the centre. This is part of a broader research project seeking to enrich understandings of the interactions between politics and space. This currently involves two different entry-points. First, the spatial categories of politics (left/right, up/down, in/out, high/low, etc) and, second, the space of politics -- which is sharply differentiated from the politics of space, which political geographers investigate.

Research interests also include Laclau, Mouffe, Rosanvallon, discourse theory, ideology, radical democracy, hegemony, and their roots in the likes of Machiavelli and Gramsci.

Anthony Leaker has a background in literature and philosophy, with a particular focus on Wittgenstein and contemporary North American fiction. 

His research on contemporary fiction is primarily focused on the critique of neoliberal work practices. His work on Wittgenstein examines the political aesthetics of his later philosophy. He also researches on questions of cultural representation and transnational populist politics. He is currently writing a book on Free Speech. 

My academic research and expertise is wideranging. While my PhD work focused on epistemology and metaphysics in Kant's theoretical philosophy, I have research interest in German Idealism, Neo-Kantianism, the Frankfurt School, Critical Realism, Speculative Realism, Marxist political economy and social theory, post-foundational political theory, structuralism and post-structuralism, and the historical and ideological roots of liberalism and conservatism.   

Dr Victoria Margree is a specialist in literary fiction and feminist theory.

She is currently co-editing a collection for Routledge on 'Neo-Victorianism and Transnational Memory: Literature, Culture, Transmediality' (forthcoming 2024).

And she is writing a book for Polity Press on 'What is Radical Feminism' (forthcoming 2025).

Her monograph British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930: Our Own Ghostliness (Palgrave, 2019) explores how the ghost story functioned as a public forum for negotiating women's changing experiences across the period of first wave feminism. It looks at stories by Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edith Nesbit, Alice Perrin, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt.

She has also published a book on the second wave feminist theorist, Shulamith Firestone (Zero Books, 2018); and co-edited an essay collection on fin de siècle popular fiction author, Richard Marsh (MUP, 2018). She is co-founder of the Short Story Network, a network for researchers of the short story of the long 19th century.

Dr Chrystie Myketiak is a political discourse analyst who examines language in use in order to uncover what its form, function, and structure tells us about interaction, structural inequalities, and the covert values and beliefs within a culture. Her research interests are in power and justice; gender, sexualities, desire; intersectionality; violence; social norms; sociocultural theories (specifically, feminist and queer theories); mediated communication.

Chrystie's specialist research is in three areas, with each strand combining her general interests. The first addresses talk about sex, sexuality and desire as social forces through the investigation of conversations in a technologically-mediated community; the monograph, Online Sex Talk and the Social World (Palgrave, "Studies on Language, Gender, and Sexuality"), culminates her work in this area. In order to support her writing of this book, the University of Brighton awarded her a Sabbatical Award. Chrystie's second strand of research is an intersectional discourse analysis of texts produced by mass shooters, which focuses on how the desire-centred discourse strategies used by the offenders attempt to legitimate structural inequalities and construct normative identities. This research will be published in the book Discourse, Demand, Desire: An Intersectional Analysis of Mass Shooter Texts (Palgrave). Her third body of research examines accountability and agency in medical contexts. This work began as a discursive-pragmatic analysis in clinical incident reporting and more recently, alongside collaborators in Australia, focuses on domestic violence policies in primary care settings

German Primera is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Politics at the University of Brighton. He is Deputy Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), and serves as an editor for Contemporary Political Theory and the Journal of Italian Philosophy. His teaching and research span contemporary French and Italian philosophy, Black studies, and biopolitics.

His work is centrally concerned with the politics of refusal, understood as a critical and generative practice that challenges dominant grammars of power, subjectivity, and critique. Bringing together Black radical thought, contemporary continental philosophy, and political theory, his research examines how practices of fugitivity, improvisation, and non-compliance reconfigure the limits of critique and open alternative modes of social and political life.

He is also a member of the Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe (CAPONEU), a research consortium funded by the EU Horizon scheme, which examines the cultural and political significance of the political novel in contemporary Europe.

German is currently co-authoring a book with Professor Mark Devenney, Troubling Democracy: On Practices of Care, Fugitivity, and Refusal (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press). His first monograph, The Political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben (Bloomsbury, 2019), explores the relationship between political ontology and violence. Across his publications, he develops a sustained account of how relational ontologies and Black studies unsettle established frameworks of biopolitics, sovereignty, and resistance.

Selected Publications

Journal Articles and Special Issues

Primera, G. E. (2026) Anti-dialectical Noise, Improvisation and the Temporality of Black Social Life, Paragraph, 49(1), pp. 45–61.

Primera, G. E. and Ventura, D. (eds.) (2026) Temporalities of Refusal: Fugitivity, Imagination, Radical Futurities, special issue of Paragraph.

Primera, G. E. and Ventura, D. (2026) Time and Refusal in Contemporary Black Radical Thought: An Introduction, Paragraph, 49(1), pp. 1–13.

Primera, G. (2024) Inoperativity as a Form of Refusal: On Bonnie Honig’s Reading of Agamben, Res Publica. Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas, 27(1), pp. 45–49.

Marmont, G. and Primera, G. (2020) Propositions for Inoperative Life, Journal of Italian Philosophy, 3.

Primera, G. (2016) Economic Theology, Governance and Neoliberalism: The Lessons of The Kingdom and the Glory, Praktyka Teoretyczna, 2.

Chapters and Books

Primera, G. (forthcoming, 2025) Agamben y la Signatura de la Secularización: entre lo Profano y lo Postsecular, in Blanco, A. (ed.), Los Estudios Postseculares de la Literatura: Teoría, Historia y Crítica.

Primera, G. (2024) Institución y Fugitividad: La Italian Theory y el reto de la teoría crítica negra, in Galindo, A. (ed.), La institución o la vida: un análisis filosófico. Madrid: Guillermo Escolar Editor.

Primera, G. (2019) Violence, Biopolitics and Resistance: The Meaning of Violence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben, in Rae, G. and Ingala, E. (eds.), The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics. Routledge.

Primera, G. and Lamb, M. (2019) Sovereignty between the Katechon and the Eschaton: Rethinking the Leviathan, Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary, 187.

Primera, G. (2019) Introduction to the Thought of Roberto Esposito, in Rose, D. and Lewis, M. (eds.), The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader.

Primera, G. (2019) Giorgio Agamben, in Rose, D. and Lewis, M. (eds.), The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader.

He has also co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Italian Philosophy titled The Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Inoperativity.

His earlier work engages with neoliberalism, sovereignty, and governmentality through French poststructuralism and Italian political thought. His research on political violence and biopolitics interrogates dynamics of exclusion and their relation to liberal democracy, contributing to post-Marxist debates on populism and radical democracy. This includes participation in the Transnational Populist Politics project (Buenos Aires 2015; Brighton 2016, 2017).

Invited Talks and Keynote Addresses

• “The Politics of Refusal”, Cultural Production and Social Justice Seminar Series, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics (20 February 2026)
• Keynote: “Colonial Biopolitics and the Arc of Refusal: Rethinking Grammars of Resistance”, Rethinking the Political: Narrative, Protest and Fiction in the 21st Century, CAPONEU 2nd Annual Conference (9–11 September 2024)
• “Institución y Fugitividad: La Italian Theory y el reto de la teoría crítica negra”, Seminario Internacional Escrit: Estudio y Crítica de la Italian Theory, Murcia (June 2023)

Selected Conference Presentations

• “The Politics of Inoperativity and the Homo Sacer Project”, Congreso Internacional: Agamben, La Urgencia del Pensamiento, Granada (October 2022)
• “Political Theology and Inoperativity”, Society for European Philosophy / Forum for European Philosophy Annual Conference, Royal Holloway, London (2019)
• “Logistics, Biopolitics and Ordering”, Violence, Space and the Political, National University of Ireland, Galway (2018)
• “The Signature of Secularisation: The Profane Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben”, London Conference in Critical Thought, London South Bank University (2017)
• “Violence, Biopolitics and Resistance”, The Meaning of Violence, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2017)
• “Resisting Biopolitics: Destituent Power and Inoperativity”, British Political Studies Association Conference, University of Brighton (2016)
• “Extrajudicial Killings in Colombia”, Theorising Transnational Populist Politics, Buenos Aires (2015)

Raphael has published two books and over 20 articles and chapters, in leading academic journals such as Citizenship Studies, Critical Social Policy, Environmental Politics and the European Journal of Social Theory.

His most recent book is titled ‘Spycops’ and was the first academic examination of the 2015-2026 Undercover Policing Inquiry, with a focus on the contest between secrecy and disclosure. It is the outcome of a 10-year research project into the undercover policing of social movements in Britain. Raphael has communicated his findings to a range of public audiences through talks, blogs and interviews. 'Spycops' has been cited in legal submissions to the Undercover Policing Inquiry and in the 2024 report of the House of Lords statutory inquiries committee.

Raphael’s first monograph, ‘Against Old Europe’, was concerned with the study of European social movements and examined critical theory approaches to globalisation, including work by Touraine, Habermas, Negri, Holloway and Postone.

Most recently, Raphael has carried out research on the Brook House Inquiry into the mistreatment of immigration detainees, partly funded by the Socio-Legal Studies Association.

Rebecca Searle is a contemporary historian whose work explores the ways in which the study of the past can be used to make critical interventions in the politics of the present. Her research focuses on housing, property and urban change in twentieth and twenty-first century Britain, examining the historical roots of the contemporary housing crisis and the relationship between property development, global finance and the ways housing markets reshape cities.

Her research is developed through collaborations with a range of community organisations, policymakers and local stakeholders. She is particularly interested in forms of co-produced research that bring together academic scholarship and local knowledge to better understand the forces shaping housing and urban development. She founded the University of Brighton Housing Forum, a network bringing together academics, policymakers and community organisations working on housing and urban development in Brighton and Hove.

Rebecca leads Who Owns Brighton, a community research project investigating property ownership and development in the city. Developed in partnership with the Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust and funded by the Civic Power Fund, the project brings together researchers and residents to explore what is being built in Brighton, who benefits from urban development, and how communities can better understand and intervene in the planning process.

Her wider research interests include the history of twentieth and twenty-first century Britain, particularly the history of gender and sexuality, war and conflict, and politics and political movements.

My current research is focused on disability, looking at historical and contemporary forms of disability theory and politics. I established and co-ordinate the ‘Disability Politics’ strand of CAPPE, which hosts a series of community-led research events and collaborative projects, exploring current issues facing disabled people. I am committed to putting disabled people's voices at the centre of my research, and to transforming academic methodologies, practice and forms of publishing, to ensure meaningful accessibility. 

I also work on feminist theory and politics, with a focus on issues of social reproduction and reproductive politics. I am also interested in the entanglement of gender, sexuality, disability, and race, through the history and legacies of public health policies, population control, and eugenics. I have recently worked with ‘From Small Beginnings’ and the ‘Global Anti-Eugenics Forum,’ facilitating research on the legacies of eugenics within intellectual paradigms, state infrastructures, social policies and the built environment of the UK. Alongside Vicky Margree, I established and co-ordinate the 'Politics of Reproduction' strand of CAPPE, which runs regular reading groups, academic and non-academic talks, and conferences on contemporary issues around reproduction.   

I have previously written on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary artistic practice, specialising in the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s-70s, often taken to be the index of art’s ‘globalisation’. Situating Conceptual Art within a broad and heterogeneous ‘conceptualist’ tendency, inherent to postwar art in many parts of the world, my work traced the varying manifestations—and resistances—to the conceptual form that emerged through the radical politics and aesthetics of different regions.

 My broader research interests include philosophy, critical theory, the history of capitalism and radical and revolutionary politics. I teach across the Humanities subject area, acting as module leader for ‘The History of Sex and Gender,’ and ‘Body Politics, Body Ethics,’ and co-designed and teach on the Politics degree, BA (Hons) Politics, Sex, Gender. 

Her research interests broadly encompass 'public control over the wider determinants of health'. This includes 'access to information' and UK public health policy implemented in settings such as workplaces and local government.

Her interests are influenced by World Health Organization strategy, e.g. the Ottawa Charter (1986) and the Helsinki Statement (2014: 2-3,9). The latter document calls for safeguards to protect policies from distortion by commercial and vested interests; transparent policy making and access to information; participation of wider society in the development and implementation of government policy; and environmental sustainability. 

She is currently researching public views on the NHS, empowerment and public health leadership.

My reseach interests are in contemporary literature and culture, most specifically in Black British, post-communist/'Eastern European' and queer writing. Recent publications in these areas include 'Eastern Europeans and BrexLit' (JPW Special Issue Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains), 'Redressing Racist Legacies in the Melancholic Nation: Anger and Silences in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon' (Special In Memoriam Issue of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, ed. by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson-Welsh and Michael Perfect). 

My 2019 monograph - the first book about the representations of 'Eastern European' migrants in contemporary British literature and culture - provides a comprehensive study of this 'wave' of migration to the UK and Western Europe following the enlargement of the EU in the 21st century, the social and political changes after the fall of communism, and the Brexit vote. It explores the recurring figures of 'Eastern Europeans' as a new reservoir of cheap labour in multiple contemporary cultural texts:

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137537911#aboutBook

My recent activities have been focused on building long-lasting community partnerships, most notably with New Writing South (acting as one of their Trustees), Marlborough Productions and The Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence (Sussex University) through our co-organisation and co-curation of the The Coast is Queer, UK's biggest LGBTQIA+ literature festival https://coastisqueer.com/, Afrori Books (through book clubs and the AHRC Ignite-funded projects - https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/decolonisingatfalmer/anti-racist-kids-project/) https://afroribooks.co.uk/, and the Brighton Book Festival (as part of the programming team in the last 2 years https://www.brightonbookfestival.co.uk/).

I am currently working on exploring queer intergenerationality through community co-creation with The Coast is Queer festival, and on completing my first poetry pamphlet.  

Recent Funded Projects

'Building Queer Intergenerational Spaces Through Literature' at the Coast is Queer 2025 - with Charlotte Wilcox and Lesley Wood (funded by AHRC Ignite 3.4) https://coastisqueer.com/reading-across-generations-the-coast-is-queer-reading-group/; https://coastisqueer.com/event/mapping-culture-and-connection-workshop/

'Queer Intergenerational Conversations' at the Coast is Queer 2024 - with Charlotte Wilcox and Lesley Wood (funded by AHRC Ignite 3.3) https://coastisqueer.com/event/queer-intergenerational-conversations-at-the-coast-is-queer-2024/

'ARK' - anti-racist kids club - community partnership project with Afrori Books, Blatchington Mill School and Cardinal Newman School (funded by AHRC Ignite 3.2) to deliver Afrori's flagship 6 weeks' anti-racist kids workshops to Y7 and Y9 pupils, and train Brighton Univeristy's students who are interested in anti-racist education (completed June-July 2024; https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/decolonisingatfalmer/anti-racist-kids-project/).

'Reading to Resist, Reading to Belong: A Space for Black Writing'- community partnership project with Afrori and Diversity Lewes (funded by AHRC Ignite 3.1) explores how the bookshop acts as a space of community and belonging and what the act of reading Black Literature in Brighton means in terms of anti-racist practice, resistance, and representation, as well as how it can promote wellbeing, pleasure and joy in an increasingly hostile environment for racialised communities. Details of the project can be found here: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/decolonisingatfalmer/reading-to-resist-reading-to-belong-community-university-partnership/. The title of the project was inspired by Prof Suzanne Scafe's talk for the DeCol Collective: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/decolonisingatfalmer/reading-to-resist-the-disruptive-potential-of-black-british-literature/

Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe (CAPONEU) (EU Horizon, co-I) - aims to assess the political novel as an important element of European political, social and cultural heritage. It sets out to examine how people in different national and cultural contexts engage with contemporary political issues and thereby have their share in shaping European societies and politics. More about the project: https://www.caponeu.eu/

Events/projects/conferences

https://coastisqueer.com/- various events, including with Yael van der Wouden, Max Lobe, Pajtim Statovci 

An interview with Monique Roffey for the Big Read Event: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/bigread/2021/03/31/2021-monique-roffey/

Queer Writers from the Post-Yugoslav region, The Coast is Queer Festival, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilVnrAl-pU&t=79s

Within the Four Walls: Queer Lockdown Stories Project, 1-4:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwaC7xY_pro&t=77s (with Juno Roche, Nehaal Bajwa, Mikey Birtwistle and Zia X)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqfyzLnKDq4&t=59s (with Annie Whilby – AFLO. the poet, Nat Raha, Razan Ghazzawi and Savannah Sevenzo)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIcC59HnC7E&t=116s (with Tanaka Mhishi, Daniel Spelman, Jane Traies and Subira Wahogo)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8V0E0RXD9s&t=4s

(with: Sea Sharp, John McCullough, Ray Filar and Roxana Xamán).

Common Threads: Black and Asian British Women's Writing International  Conference, Keynote Speakers: Bernardine Evaristo, Sharon Duggal, Louisa Uchum Egbunike, University of Brighton, 21-23 July 2022 (co-organised with Prof Suzanne Scafe, Dr Kadija George and Dr Sarah Lawson-Welsh) https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/decolonisingatfalmer/common-threads-black-and-asian-british-womens-writing-international-conference/. 

See The Amplify Project podcast about the 2022 conference here: https://theamplifyproject.co.uk/writers/common-threads-black-and-asian-british-womens-writing-international-conference-2022/

Black British Women's Writing: Tracing the Tradition and New Directions, First International Conference of the Black British Women's Writers Network (BBWWN, https://www.facebook.com/groups/Black-British-Women%27s-Writing-Network-378188258946761/), Keynote Speaker: Bernardine Evaristo, University of Brighton July 2014

Videos from the conference:

Valerie Mason-John: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZYzQOJSbXk

Dorothea Smartt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZDN5f4u8x4

Dr Aakanksha J. Virkar specialises in modern literature and culture between 1870-1945 and particularly the relations between literature, philosophy, music and visual culture in this period.

Her more recent research on T. S. Eliot considers Eliot's work in interdiscplinary contexts. She is particularly interested in Eliot's relation to Beethoven, and the artistic, philosophical and political reception of the composer in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

From 2024-2026, Aakanksha has been awarded a prestigious British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her project 'T. S. Eliot and Beethoven: Aesthetics, Music and Politics 1870-1945'.

Her 2024 open access article in the Journal of Modern Literature https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/916896 explores Eliot's Beethoven-inspired 'Coriolan' series (1932) in light of the 1902 Beethoven art exhibition of the Vienna Secession and fascist cultural ideology in the 1920s and 1930s.

Aakanksha is also a Research Fellow (2023-2026) at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and is working on a joint monograph on T. S. Eliot and Beethoven with the musicologist Prof Daniel Chua (Hong Kong University).

For the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, Aakanksha was interviewed on BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week' for the 'Beethoven Unleashed' series. Her interview ('Spirit of the Age' Episode 5: 'Legacy and Belief') is available here  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/37916tSXw7s3CRcj9FZjpyq/beethoven-unleashed-the-box-set 

Her earlier work on the Victorian poet G. M. Hopkins has also gained recognition. Her article on Hopkins and emblematics was ranked amongst the 50 Most Read articles published by ‘Literature and Theology’ (OUP) between 2007-2012.

Her monograph The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2018) is published in the Routledge Nineteenth Century Series.

“this is a lovely and lovingly realized book that participates in the ongoing so-called turn to religion in Victorian studies in its reassessment of Victorian mysticism and Hopkins’s place in the mystical tradition. Each of its chapters is quickpaced and tightly written, rapidly moving the reader across centuries’ worth of textual, religious, and visual materials… a testament to [Virkar] Yates’s success in capturing the dynamism and profundity of her subject matter”  ---- Winter Jade Werner, Victorian Studies 62.1 (2019): 154-156.

"Close reading of Hopkins’ never less than challenging verse is pursued in this book with theological rigour and learning in a manner that will ensure that it will become a central resource in scholarship on the finest of late nineteenth English poets... a work of fine scholarship, theologically learned and poetically sensitive, and yet at the same time spiritually acute and attentive to the delicate, complex world of Hopkins and his writings. This is a book to be treasured and pondered upon."  --- David Jasper, Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, University of Glasgow

• Race/ethnicity studies (esp. Chinese ethnic identity and transnational migration in the context of “tradition” revival)
• Mixed research methods
• Critical studies of Chinese citizenship
• Education and social justice (with a focus on critical pedagogy and civic activism in Chinese “tradition” education)
• Grassroots education movement and Chinese civil society
• Gender studies (esp. Chinese professional womanhood)
• Social theory (esp. Michel Foucault, reflexive modernity, and Chinese sociological theories)
• Comparative history of sociology (focusing on China and the UK)

My academic pursuits are deeply embedded in the intersection of sociology and Chinese studies, with a specialization in the nuanced facets of race and ethnicity. I am particularly drawn to the investigation of Chinese ethnic identity and the intricate patterns of transnational migration, as well as the renaissance of traditional cultural practices within these communities. The methodological approach I adopt is pluralistic, employing qualitative and quantitative research strategies to provide a comprehensive and robust analysis of sociocultural phenomena.

Central to my scholarly endeavors is the critical examination of Chinese citizenship. This inquiry critically intersects with issues of education and social justice, where I focus on the role of critical pedagogy and civic activism in the revival of Confucian education in China. This line of inquiry naturally extends to an examination of grassroots educational movements, which I scrutinize for their capacity to influence and reform Chinese civil society.

Furthermore, gender studies constitute a vital strand of my research, with particular attention to the construction and experience of professional womanhood within the Chinese context. This interest is couched within a broader engagement with social theory, drawing upon the insights of thinkers such as Michel Foucault and the concept of reflexive modernity, alongside indigenous Chinese sociological theories.

Lastly, my academic exploration includes a comparative historical analysis of sociological traditions, with a focus on the intellectual dialogues between China and Britain. This comparative aspect aims to shed light on the divergent sociological pathways and the contextual specificity that shape sociological scholarship across different sociocultural landscapes.

Clare Woodford is Principal Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)  School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Brighton; director of the CAPPE Critical Theory research group strand; School Doctoral Studies Lead; and Principal Director for the AHRC Wellbeing State Research Network. She has published widely on democratic theory, populism, violence and polarization, and their application in politics and policy, drawing on the politics of care, gender theory, aesthetics, and ethics. Her book Disorienting democracy: politics of emancipation (2017, Routledge) juxtaposed Rancière’s thought with that of Butler, Cavell, Menke and Derrida to draw out the practical implications of Rancière’s writing for democratic political strategising. Her collaboration with Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig, Towards a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence (co-edited with Tim Huzar, 2021, Fordham) brings these thinkers into conversation with other leading feminist and gender theorists to argue that we need to attend more carefully to political infrastructural organisation if we are to construct a more democratic, less violent world.

Clare's work currently evaluates how we might strengthen democracy to oppose authoritarianism, extremism, and right wing populism via a reworking of the democratic welfare state in the 21st C language of wellbeing.  An important subtheme of this involves understanding the role of affect (e.g. love, rage, grief) in contemporary democratic movements for social justice, both online and in the streets.

Clare’s research is primarily motivated by concern about the relationship between inequality and violence and unrest and how we can design feasible but socially just policies to respond to these in advanced capitalist democracy. Working at the interstices of ethics, aesthetics, poststructuralism, democratic, and gender theory, she is fascinated by concepts of social order and disorder; finitude and the edges of being and knowledge; the inter-play of faith, reason, perception, belief and action; and the varied ways in which social animals communicate with one another and both make themselves (or fail to make themselves) understood and how we seek (or fail to seek) to understand others.

Clare welcomes inquiries for doctoral research and is available to supervise PhDs in any area related to her work. Please email enquiries to c.woodford@brighton.ac.uk.

Current PhD funding opportunities:

ESRC SC DTP

AHRC TECHNE

Future Societies

Chris Wyatt’s research interests are, from his doctoral thesis through to his current work on alternative theoretical approaches to political economy, are on the libertarian left, which at base theorises non-authoritarian forms of socialism.  Areas of interest are workplace cooperatives, direct forms of democracy and creative labour.  His continuing project is to sketch the organisational contours of a democratically planned economy beyond the boundaries of market and statehood.  The main thinkers cover in his work are G.D.H. Cole, John Rawls, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Micheal Bakunin, Roberto Michels, Frederick Hayek and J.J. Rousseau.  The endorsements for his second book are as follows.

"Capitalism is in crisis, but all the alternatives appear to be discredited. The Defetishised Society is a remarkable achievement that indicates the preliminary steps beyond this impasse. Chris Wyatt demonstrates the contemporary relevance of Marx's critique of alienation, reification, and fetishism. But he goes beyond Marx and critique by showing how advanced capitalist societies can draw on reserves of libertarian potential to move beyond the crises of technocratic capitalism, stagnant social democracy and state socialism in decline. The book will surely be one of the most important works of political theory for years to come."- Darrow Schecter, University of Sussex"The Defetishized Society analyses our commodified lives, both through Marx's theory of commodity fetishism and the fetishism of commodities we see in everyday society today. But Chris Wyatt does not just interpret the world. He also looks at how to change it. His book goes argues for a system of economic democracy that exposes commodity fetishism. Wyatt's libertarian socialist approach offers an alternative to both the libertarianism of the right and the statism of the left.This book is important, sophisticated and relevant. It is embedded in a solid theoretical grounding but also attuned to concrete contemporary realities. It is academically sound and sophisticated yet also develops political implications and practical possibilities." -Luke Martell, Professor of Political Sociology, University of Sussex"Wyatt's book is topical and important. Well-informed and clearly written, it describes a radical economic and political alternative to the the sorry present disorder. He draws on G. D. H. Cole's libertarian socialism, Rawls's work on the equitable distribution of resources, and Marx's ideas on commodity fetishism. The resulting synthesis provides provides a powerful argument for a New Economic Democracy which would provide an alternative cooperative mode of production and. equally important, a corresponding mode of consumption. If enough people read this book, and act on it, there is hope for us yet." - David Mclellan, Professor of Political Theory, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.

Heba’s research interests are in the fields of colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies. Recent research projects have focused on the intersections between nationalism, colonialism and empire, and the racial capitalist configurations of nation-building projects in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work unsettles normative thinking about national movements, state-building and socialist-modernist development, through in-depth readings of Zionism’s early colonial interventions in Palestine. Her most recent projects also interrogate European diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, as integral to the transit of European racial and colonial logics around the world. She is also currently co-leading a new book project on the ‘Abolitionist International’, funded by an ESRC grant.

Beatriz’s research interests go beyond the academic sphere. She is fundamentally an activist academic. She is a member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association (EnPax), The Gender and Development Network (GADN), the Peace Research Seminar (SIP), the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC), one of the nine stakeholder groups of the United Nations Framework for the Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), where she is part of the Executive board in both its UK and Spain branches. Since 2020, she actively participates in WILPF’s WPS, Environment and Climate Justice working groups, and since 2023 she coordinates the research and actions around the Fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative within WILPF Spain.

During the academic year 2022-2023, she is a PRG co-representative at the University’s Committee of Research Ethics and Integrity (UCOREI).

In early 2023, she co-coordinated the People & Planet’s petition for a fossil free careers service at the University of Brighton, for which, in May 2023, she submitted a motion to the University and College Union (UCU) Brighton branch, which passed unanimously.

She is a feminist, a pacifist, a unionist and an ecologist.

My PhD research, undertaken in collaboration with the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People. focuses on the history of the Disabled People's Movement (DPM) in Britain and, in particular, its contribution to political theory. Utilising the recently opened Disabled People's Archives in Manchester - the largest collection of DPM papers in Britain - I seek to show the depth and nuance of the DPM's analytic models and theoretical positions; foregrounding the concrete emancipatory struggles and competing visions of equality and liberation which made this intellectual work possible. Against modern readings of the DPM's analysis, I argue that this intellectual corpus is neither monolithic, myopic, nor reductive; and is best understood as a complex integration of macrological social theory, institutional critique, and theories of social change into an operational model of social movement practice. This entails that the DPM's history and theoretical productions are read in dialogue with political economy, theories of the state, and contemporary social movement history.

I am a doctoral researcher funded by the Doctoral Training Alliance (DTA) Future Societies. My PhD project explores the relationship between water-related environmental change and mobility in Newham, London. Through deeply embedded and mobile qualitative fieldwork (including living and volunteering in, and moving through, Newham), I hope to shed light on how issues including street flooding, river contamination and waterfront regeneration impact the mobilities of local residents.

With a special focus on justice, I hope to explore how the environment-mobility nexus unfolds unevenly across urban land- and waterscapes; how politics and infrastructures past and present play a role throughout; and which solutions communities see fit to mobilise themselves (and protect their right to stay put) in the face of evolving environmental challenges.

I have taught in the following (and welcome invitations to contribute to similar) modules:- UK Energy and Environment Policy and Law (University College London)- Environmental Politics: Institutions, Actors and Contested Lives (University of Brighton)

Wanda’s PhD asks whether the community, as an alternative to the criminal justice system, might reproduce modes of policing and neoliberalism. She explores whether this contradicts the aspirations of contemporary abolitionism—the movement against prisons, police and policing. Wanda is interested in how insider/outsider binaries are created and in different contexts, such as via academic and community gatekeeping. Wanda interweaves musicology and critical theory, exploring how music could inform abolitionist praxis.

Wanda is critical of the criminalisation of rappers and rap music, particularly focusing on Grime and UK Drill.

In 2022 Wanda founded Sonic Rebellions, an international network of artists, activists and academics exploring the relationship between sound and social justice. The network aims to have participatory events bi-annually and is currently finalising its second book under Routledge.

Wanda teaches criminology and is most interested in themes of policing, punishment, subjectivity, psychoanalysis and radical politics. She is passionate about experiential, decolonial and interactive learning. 

She has previously worked in community and forensic mental health and support services as a practitioner, consultant and service manager with a focus on peer support, co-production, trauma and recovery.

She is currently interested in collaborations and projects which involve abolitionism, community and commons, musicking, anti-racism, and socio-sonic politics.  

Having worked for over 30 years in senior marketing roles across telecommunications, central government agencies and the wider public sector, I often reflect on whether the work I have done has really added value to society.

Marketing under capitalism has played a significant role in the destruction of global ecosystems, with its relentless pursuit of growth, and continuous commodification of confected needs and wants. Efforts to introduce sustainable practices into marketing have failed to stem this eco-crisis.

My research is focussed on how we can use marketing to move to a new political economy that creates a balance between the social and the ecological - an alternative system that combines traditional 'red' and 'green' policies - a transition to an 'ecosocialist' state through methods such as 'degrowth', to deliver long-term human and ecological wellbeing.

In 2024, I completed an MSc in Social Marketing at the University of Brighton. This supported my current work implementing government policy to build a geological disposal facility: to deal with higher-activity radioactive waste, through a consent-based siting process with communities in England.

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is a multi-disciplinary pursuit embodying many concepts from across social science and the humanities but my research primarily centres around the analysis of public discourse, specifically the strategies used by social actors in text and talk to propagate their subjective representations of society and maintain the dominant hegemony.  Using corpus linguistic techniques, I analysed the online media’s discursive representation of the British Monarchy from 2010 – 2020 and prior to that I conducted a discursive qualitative analysis of LBC’s Nigel Farage Show in which participants and the host employed a range of rhetorical devices to positively categorise their in-group and negatively construct a group of migrants fleeing persecution.  Currently, I am analysing the right wing populist group, the Freedom Association (TFA), and their campaign to ‘Axe the TV Tax’. 

The project for my PhD is an analysis of the discourse employed by politicians and other prominent public figures in the categorisation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Migrants (RASIM) on BBC Radio 4’s panel debate programme, Any Questions, before, during and after the 2016 Brexit Referendum.  

The title of my PhD is: 'How systematic were the British Army's war crimes in Iraq between 2003 and 2009? An investigation into Britain's abuse of underage Iraqi boys'. It is an examination of the scope and scale of the British Army's perpetration of torture, murder, inhumane treatment, and sexual violence during the occupation of Iraq, specifically concerning cases involving underage Iraqi male victims. I have previously had articles published on the British Army's perpetration of torture, murder, and sexual violence against Iraqi boys, and on other war crimes committed by the British Army in Iraq, in which I used information gathered from Freedom Of Information requests, legal documentation, and reportage by the International Criminal Court.The title of my MA thesis, which I undertook at King's College London in 'Global Ethics and Human Values', was: 'Was it moral for America, Britain and France to pursue regime change in Syria from 2011 onwards?'. I argued that the Western regime change policy in Syria was immoral; I obtained a Distinction and the award for the best annual dissertation.

Aurore Damoiseaux is a Techne-funded PhD student researching the political and social weight of dress at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (1981-2000). Her research includes oral testimonies and object analysis to reflect on the use of dress objects at the camp in Greenham Common to embody the fight against nuclear weapons.

She is interested in dress as carrier of emotion and memory, and as tool to promote ideas and ideology. Through her research, Aurore explores themes such as the creation of alternative communities, feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s, representations of women in mass-media, the musealisation of political events and the performance of domesticity in the public space of the peace camp.

From January 2026, Aurore is a Design History Society student ambassador. 

My research investigates how populist theory and practice engage with climate politics and how it could provide ways of tackling the climate crisis. A key focus of my PhD research will be to consider the interactions between populist movements and indigenous and feminist politics, especially in terms of the environment.

Online shopping and the gig economy: a sociological study of alienation in Brighton and Reykjavik

My PhD research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership (ESRC Ref: ES/P000673/1), included interviews conducted in different societal contexts: Brighton, England and Reykjavik, Iceland, with the data thematically analysed. I find that online shopping is directly alienating, with participants consistently expressing discontent and malaise with the practice – indicating disturbed relations of appropriation. Engaging in online shopping may also diminish empathy for others and compromise affection for the natural environment, indirectly alienating individuals from those relations.

I argue that the focus of society has shifted from relatively stable production-based, to relatively transitory consumption-based practice, with forms of identity adjusting accordingly. I theorise that within this environment, four alienating relational processes have become prominent: marketised cultural relations, atomised human relations, incongruous relations to digital ‘space’, and intractable relations to time. I posit that these contextual aspects overlap and interweave with one another, inducing alienating online shopping practice. Online shopping therefore encapsulates the four alienating contextual factors, whilst reinforcing that context. Consequently, late-capitalist consumer society comprises a mutually reinforcing alienating context and alienating practice.

My final thesis - Online shopping and the gig economy: a sociological study of alienation in Brighton and Reykjavik – is available to read online. If you would like to discuss the research, please contact me via LinkedIn.

My practice-based PhD, 'Nineteenth-century Ambivalence and the Gendered Body: A Practice-based Study of Dr James Barry', is a multidisciplinary project combining literary criticism, archival research and creative writing, culminating in a critical and creative exploration of transgender pioneer Dr James Barry (1789-1865).

Interrogating how portrayals of gender changed and were constructed in the face of nineteenth-century colonialism, I am interested in the ethics and efficacy of representing complex queer histories, especially in doing justice to the racially marginalised individuals in stories like Barry's, whose lives are not archived.

Bringing the conventions of the 19th-century novel, especially the gothic, into conversation with real archival material and developments in medicine and science, my project aims to apply queer and decolonial theory to creative writing - interrogating the idea of a single archival truth, and examining methods such as Saidiya Hartman's 'critical fabulation'.

My research interests primarily lie in heterolingualism. I focus on languages and literature, comparative literature, creative writing, linguistics and psycholinguistics, literary phenomenology and aesthetics. My work looks at how heterolingual poetry reveals the poet's emotional attachment to the languages they use in their writing.

I am a Post-doctoral Researcher in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics (CAPPE). I also work with the Wellbeing State Network. My work reconceptualises the politics of resistance by rethinking property ownership across a range of traditions. I am interested in how proprietary relationships – the dynamic between ontology/subjectivity and forms of appropriation – work in tandem to legitimise inequality, precarity, dispossession, exploitation, and other forms of violence. I contend that colonial incursions, projects of racialisation, gendered violence, ethno-nationalisms, wage theft, financial extractivism, and ecological breakdown are overdetermined, but related forms of oppression. My work is invested in a wide range of scholarship in critical theory, Black Studies, the Black radical tradition, Indigenous scholarship, decolonial legal theory, feminist philosophy, deconstruction, and post-Marxism.

I am currently turning my doctoral thesis into a book for publication. My doctoral thesis rethinks property, deconstruction, the commons, democracy, and Black radicalism in novel ways to theorise how political resistance disrupts and remakes proprietary ownership and the inequality these engender. In doing so, I understand political resistance contra traditional political theories which fall broadly into two camps: demanding a response from power (populist politics, mass movements, democratic party politics, and so on) or not speaking to power and refusing its authority (forms of fugitivity, revolutionary politics, etc.). I propose there is no proper mode of resistance. Instead, equality is performatively constituted through these very acts of resistance to remake proprietary forms of ownership: be it mass demonstrations, strikes, welfare programmes, the rebellions of enslaved people, occupations, new practices of care, transformative justice programmes, modes of refusal and fugitivity, and beyond. To achieve this, I develop a number of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive ideas as tools for political theory, rethinking them through the lenses of critical theory, Black Studies, the Black radical tradition, Indigenous scholarship, decolonial legal theory, feminist philosophy, and post-Marxism.

I have published pieces on property, ownership, and deconstruction. With Hannah Voegele, I interveiwed Brenna Bhandar and Eva von Redecker. Alongside Ian Sinclair, I interviewed Wendy Brown. Together with Viktoria Huegel, I co-founded and was Senior Editor of Interfere Journal. As a Lecturer, I have taught on a variety of courses including democratic theory, democratic politics and movements, philosophy, social inequalities, sociology, criminology, state power, and theories of punishment. Previously, I worked as a Researcher for the University of Brighton on two separate projects: The Politics of Populist Discourse in the UK (2014-2019) and COVID-19: The History of Immunity and Autoimmunity in Political Theory. My Master’s thesis investigated possession, ownership, and political subjectivity in the work of Judith Butler. My undergraduate thesis researched the performativity of subjectivity and identity in women’s football.

Sylvie Jane Lewis is a funded Art and Media PhD student and published poet. Her research interests include literary modernists (including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hope Mirrlees and Sylvia Townsend Warner), early cinema and photography, gender, queerness, fantasy, and shyness. As of October 2025, she is pursuing a Techne-funded PhD titled An Archive of Fairies: Modernism, Fantasy, and Shy Ephemera 1890-1930. This doctorate will explore the presences of fairies in literary modernism and early film and photography, and utilise the fairy to reimagine archival practice. The project's central thesis statement is that the fairy in the modernist novel, as influenced by cinematic projection, embodies literary modernist shyness. In this critical reading, the imagery of the fantastical gives shape to quiet feelings where the conventions of narrative realism falter.

She is published widely as a creative (predominantly as a poet), with features in The London Magazine, Acumen, the Young Poets Network (Poetry Society), and fourteen poems, as well as being commended in prizes such as the Ware Poets Competition and the Free Verse Prize. In October 2025, she was awarded third place in the international Bridport Poetry Prize, also winning the 2025 Bridport Young Writer Award, as the highest placing young person across their various competitions. In her creative work, she is drawn to the subjects of fairy tales, the creaturely, and the ephemeral, subjects which feed into her research. 

I am broadly interested in how bodies become legibile through their timings and rhythm and how timing and rhythm can be used as a mode of queer temporal resistance. My work explores these issues through both theortical engagement with queer theory and 20th century continental philosophy, as well as literary and filmic textual readings. 

My doctoral thesis 'Destabilising the Chrononormative: Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Freeman' sits at the intersection of queer theory of temporality, continental philosophy, film studies and literary studies and simultaneously builds upon relational queer theory and explores novel avenues for the queering of Woolf's work. 

Ivonne is a decolonial scholar with a focus on sub-Saharan African material culture and art, museum histories and practice, and colonialism in Africa. She is a trained Art Historian and Anthropologist and therefore sees her practice as interdisciplinary. Much of her research is object lead focusing on object biographies and how material culture is a starting point for discussions around her broader research interests. Ivonne’s early research was focused on South Africa but this has shifted to a wider geo-political area. She is also interested in foregrounding scholars and cultural thinkers from this area in her work.

Her focus on museums began in her MA where Ivonne critiqued the disparities in knowledge produced about a nkisi displayed at the British Museum and the Songye people of Central Africa. This critique was centred around the use of labels and display in western museums. This was taken further in her MPhil which compared the display and labelling of South African beadwork at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg. Here Ivonne focused more directly on decolonial scholarship and philosophy as well using a detailed museum ethnography to unpack the role of colonialism in western museums. This research also challenged concepts of art versus ethnographic object and the validity of western museum practice.

Ivonne is currently working on a Collaborating Doctoral Studentship with the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London to uncover how colonial histories of violence are embrocated in museum archives and how these destructive narratives continue to be present in museum displays and labels. This research seeks to find practical ways to decolonise archives and museums in collaboration with the museum. Much of Ivonne’s current interests are around imperial archives, the theory and practice of decolonialism from the global south, the geopolitics of knowledge, and museum practice in the west.

I am a PhD researcher at the University of Brighton, situated in the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics. Through feminist postructural policy analysis, I am studying the racialisation of 'problems' in English policy on Green Social Prescribing (GSP). Drawing from race and cultural studies, and science and technology studies, my PhD offers a genealogical analysis of the 'problem' of racialised inequalities. Through analysing the political processes of knowledge production, the limits and contingencies of GSP-as-solution are made visible. By expanding and specifying an understanding of space, race, and health as mutually constituted, I advocate for alternative policymaking and healthcare design processes.

My research is funded by the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership. 

Colonial modernity in Dongdaemun garment district and its fashion production (1910-2014)

This research explores the influence of Japanese colonialism and American imperialism in Korea by observing the development of its fashion production in Seoul’s garment district, Dongdaemun. Dongdaemun garment district was once the heart of the national export-based economy, following the global division of labour in the 1960s when Korea took on the role of an Original Equipment Manufacturer. This meant that Korea in the later twentieth century was a ‘sweatshop of the world’, particularly of Western fashion conglomerates, without the ability to operate as an independent design and manufacturing power. Dongdaemun thus often represents an image of an ‘ugly modernisation’ where undereducated women, under poor working conditions, mind-numbingly churned out products for brands like Nike and cheap copy products made with the leftover original equipment and models.

While numerous studies on East Asian modernity in history, urban studies and anthropology emphasise speed and compression, this research casts doubt on this approach as it risks reproducing the Eurocentric framework of modernity, which assumes modernisation in Asia was a 'copy', following the encounters with the (refracted) Western colonial powers. Instead, it aims to zoom in on the divergences made in Dongdaemun and the wider fashion system, and the negotiations made by the state, city and individual makers to define modern Korean fashion. Thus, it will define colonial modernity as not only what has been lost and replaced but also survived and revived. The research will be in conversation with material culture and fashion history, as well as postcolonial and decolonial theories. 

In terms of methodology, the research will gather original sources from interviews, taking an oral history approach, and include object analyses and participant observations to understand how government initiatives influenced by global powers (e.g., Creative Design Studios, sewing classes) affected the ideas and practices of fashion in Dongdaemun.

My research is practice-based, working towards the development of a poetic memoir. This writing is a crip ecofeminist reflection on trauma and bereavement, addressing my own experiences of disability and gender-based violence, and finding parallels and affinities with the violence, trauma, and disablement that characterises ecocide, anthropocentrism, and the ideologies of climate catastrophe. As part of my commitment to crip / neuroqueer writing, I am exploring the political and intellectual significance of hybrid forms of writing, particularly those that can be defined as both critical and creative. This interest is equally informed by ecofeminist understandings of the human/nature binary, and how these categories might intersect with other binarisms both within and outside of the academy.

Among other methods, my writing is developed through a practice of walking-with non-human others. As well as an interest in the non-human as plant and animal, my work investigates the inhuman in notions of hauntedness, spectrality, and the supernatural. These are explored through a nueroqueer lens, and negotiated alongside understandings of eco-trauma as an experience of the uncanny.

My AHRC-funded research asks how trans philosophy challenges and helps think the unthought in critical and transcendental phenomenology. I consider ontologically pluralistic, post-foundationalist appropriations of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, seeking interventions in the insight that political positions can be both “true”, and built on contestable foundations. My project centres on accounts of lives lived across worlds, on borders and in positions of oppression<-->resistance. Before Brighton, my MPhil at the University of Cambridge responded to Derrida’s 1960s critique that Heidegger reinstates a “transcendental signified”. 

I am a member of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE).

My interdisciplinary practice-based research explores the multimedia potentials of storytelling to approach the articulation of shame in PTSD through synthesising psychological research with theories of creative writing, literary analysis and creative practice. My PhD research consists of an online multimedia novel together with critical, theoretical and reflective thesis that fuses embodied narrative methodology and experiential cyber storytelling with trauma and shame studies.

I combine lived experience with practice-based research developed throughout my previous studies whereby my experiential digital multimodal creative practice emerged from my research into PTSD and trauma, and later in my MA developed into an exploration and multimedia creative expression of the connection between PTSD and shame. My auto fictional novel, Indelible Stain, a continuation of this foundational work, articulates my personal experience of PTSD and shame with its experimental, fragmented, multimedia, multi-perspectivity form. My creative practice explores the connection between PTSD, trauma and shame, the effect of shame on PTSD and the self, as it explores shame through personal, relational and cultural situations and experiences.

My research offers an analysis of a selection of Harold Pinter’s plays and poetry from 1958 until 2000, in relation to the notion of ‘mental disintegration,’ as evidenced between several characters and to explore the relationship between the themes of power and agency and his later political activism.

The study includes the social and cultural background of the 1950’s in which Pinter commenced his professional writing, through to the ‘swinging 1960’s and his slow but developing career.

Pinter’s Jewish heritage, despite his faith lapsing, played a role in his work, as he felt the pain of persecution growing up and there is evidence of differing types of persecution and mental disintegration within his work, some of which he would have suffered himself.

The study aims to closely link Pinter’s history and past with regard to the fact that he was a victim of persecution, to his professional work through the form of selected characters, who are victims of ‘mental disintegration’, perpetuated by others in the plays selected.

The research considers the relationship between the ‘mental disintegration’ and themes of power and agency which are evident within Pinter’s work.

From 1984 onwards, after a short fallow period, Pinter adopted a different style, which was overtly political, where it will be argued that Pinter’s worldwide reputation now provided the greatest platform for his political activism.

In undertaking the research, the study can draw from methodology based upon the work of Freud and Jung to engage with notions of authority and power.

My research charts Pinter’s professional journey where he is simply castigated and heavily lambasted by the critics early in his career to the point when he is one of the world’s most revered playwrights, but also seeks to find solutions from different sources as to the meaning of several texts with reference to mental disintegration and the ensuing political activism towards the end of his career. The period between the 1950s through the important 1960s and the overt shift in the 1980s demonstrate how profound these periods were not just in relation to what was happening politically in the world, but for his professional work too.

Ultimately, this study demonstrates how important the relationships are between power, mental disintegration and political activism, through the vehicle of literature.

trans studies, trans healthcare, health inequality, queer studies, marginality, co-production, lay expertise, resistant knowledge, social change

My doctoral research engages critical Muslim studies in South Asia, critical race scholarship, critical social movement studies, scholarship on the coloniality of postcolonial nation-states and the concept-practices of prefiguration and refusal to think the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) conjuncture in india.

Centring a struggle as method approach, I trace the cunning of the Islamophobic indian racial state order in left-liberal politics that is otherwise deemed prefigurative. Instead, I argue that the prefigurative potentiality of the anti-CAA struggle lies in Muslim protestors' refusals of the terms and telos of the indian racial state b/order.

My research is funded by the AHRC Techne DTP.

Teaching: PO602 Activism and Social Change (2025/6); PO604 Race and International Relations (2024/5); HD423 Artist, Designer, Prosumer (2022/3)

Module design: PO604 Race and International Relations (2024/5) 

I am broadly interested in the intersection of psychology and social policy, and taking a social ecological approach to understanding the relationships between social (policy) context, wellbeing, and resilience. For instance, I was first author on a paper in the Journal of Social Policy exploring the effect of Universal Credit of welfare benefit recipients' life satisfaction.

My research focuses on the antiwork movement, a loosely defined collective that rose to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic. Social media sites such as Reddit and Facebook have become hubs for antiwork supporters. Growing interest in the subject is reflected in the popularity of the r/antiwork subreddit, which has more than 2.5 million subscribers.

There is little agreement within forums about the meaning of antiwork. Instead, members have diverse intentions, which range from seeking minor workplace reforms to attempting to eliminate capitalism. Media narratives often characterise supporters as being young and apathetic. However, it is clear that supporters differ in terms of their aspirations and the extent to which they are willing to question working habits.

Research into the movement is also topical. The pandemic has intensified discussions around work and contributed to scepticism of careerist principles. Meanwhile, phenomena such as the Great Resignation have revealed widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary employment.

My project seeks to understand which antiwork identities are being formed, and how members’ backgrounds, attitudes, and experiences inform the development of antiwork identities. The research has a digital focus, and will explore how antiwork identities are expressed in and shaped by digital spaces. In doing so, it will consider the views of both regular contributors and key informants such as forum moderators.

My PhD project is titled 'De/Constructing Identity: French, Italian, and British Gay Liberationism in the Long ‘68'. My research grapples with the present impasse of 'identity politics': the decade following the ‘transgender tipping point’ has yielded an explosion of queer and trans cultural representation, but also a potent media and political backlash, troubling straightforward conceptions of ‘progress’. Within this polarised setting, LGBTQ+ identities may only be affirmed or denied, leaving little space for more critical approaches towards ‘identity’ as a hegemonic discourse.

Against the allegation of identity-‘essentialism’ sometimes ascribed to queer theory’s gay predecessors, this project investigates the complex and critical development of gay ‘identity’ in and through the activist press in Britain, France, and Italy, across the decade following the political revolts of 1968. Through an interweaving of archival and textual-theoretical research methods, with the grassroots print culture of gay liberationist groups as primary source material, this project investigates how these underexplored histories might equip activist presents to navigate the apparent paradox of both affirming *and* transcending LGBTQ+ identities – opening onto a reenlivened ‘imagining otherwise’ (Olufemi 2021), which could intervene critically and productively in the present identity-political crisis.

My areas of research interest both within and beyond this project include Marxism and critical theory, particularly elaborating concepts of alienation, reification, dialectics, totality, and social reproduction through queer/trans and disability-focused lenses. I am interested in models of theorising the particular-universal relation, as well as materialist accounts of the role of imagination and its shaping by capitalist ideology in conceptions of identity and in identity-political activist politics.

My main interests lie within applied linguistics/ psycholinguistics, namely in bilingualism and language acquisition, as well political discourse and education policy. My current PhD project examines emotional processing in bilinguals with a particular focus on pragmatics of persuasion and approached with Relevance Theory as general theory of cognition.

Laoise Ward is a PhD researcher in the School of Education, Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Brighton. Her research interests include the role of international organisations in the education systems of countries that borrow from them. Drawing on decolonial perspectives, her work engages with questions of power, policy influences, while also considering how these structures are experienced by teachers in their professional lives.

My interests are broadly focused on creative writing, though with an inter-disciplinary perspective. My primary focus within creative writing is fiction. Within creative writing, the topics currently holding and attracting my attention follow:

unreadability

irrealism

I am a doctoral researcher exploring Black people's experiences of love, intimacy and desire within the context of 'psychosis' and recovery. My PhD research is a qualitative, interdisciplinary project, underpinned by a phenomenological approach. My work focuses on mental distress and the importance of relationality, as well as challenging colonial and racist legacies within mental health frameworks.

I am a lived experience researcher and have a strong interest in creative methods and radical methodologies. As a spoken word artist outside of academia, it has felt natural to interweave poetic inquiry throughout my work; I create poems from relevant literature to include in my thesis, and utilise poetic analysis as an interpretative method of analysing data.

I am passionate about decolonisation, as well as re-indiginisation (revisiting and returning to Black and Indigenous understandings prior to colonisation). Within my work I consider and challenge racist and colonial legacies within academia, mental health/distress, sexuality, relationships and relationality.

I am investigating whether new legislation in the UK has created a 'chilling effect' on activists, and if it has created or exacerbated a 'discriminatory impact' on protest policing.

The ‘right to protest’, as enshrined for example in the freedoms of expression and assembly of the European Convention on Human Rights, is fundamental to deliberation and governance in a liberal democracy. Yet, the UK government has sought to significantly ‘rebalance’ the scope of protest rights.

A series of new laws, policy instruments and public regulations, as well as court rulings, have generated considerable controversy. Much of the critical commentary so far has pointed out that the new regulatory landscape is ever more restrictive and specifically risks criminalising marginalised communities. Acting as a deterrent to the exercise of protest rights, recent and proposed government policies may therefore lead to a ‘chilling effect’ on democratic participation.

This research aims to examine the ‘chilling effect’ thesis. It seeks to understand whether the increased likelihood of criminalisation represents a real-life barrier to public participation in a democratic society. It aims to discover if activists have made decisions to change their ‘protest’ behaviour in response – whether through inhibiting participation, increasing participation, or seeking alternative forms of ‘counter conduct’. It also seeks to explore the differential impacts of the new protest restrictions on political activists from diverse socio-economic and demographic backgrounds, and whether the prediction that these regulations would have a ‘discriminatory impact’ against people and groups that are more likely to be criminalised has manifested in reality.

As a qualitative study, the research will explore (through fieldwork and interviews) how activists make sense of the new restrictions placed upon them and how their protest behaviours might shift in response. The findings will generate a UK evidence base to contribute understanding of an international trend to limit the ‘right to protest’ and they will inform strategies of democracy campaigners and civil liberties advocates.

I have been awarded doctoral funding from the ESRC to complete the work as part of the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership.

If you are interested in participating in interviews for this project, please contact me at H.Wishart1@uni.Brighton.ac.uk

Identification of subconscious and unconscious hybridity in cultural hybrid writing:  contextualization of a third space in cultural hybrid literature particularly in my novel LTR.