Who we are

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.

Additional roles

I am a member of the managing committee for the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton and, together with Dr Deanna Dadusc, I lead CAPPE’s Social Movements and Radical Global Politics strand. I currently co-convene the “work in progress” seminar series on Social Movements and Radical Politics and I encourage researchers working in these areas who are interested in presenting work in this series to contact me by email.

My research focuses on violence, feminism, cities, criminology, policing and insecurity. My previous work centred on issues of (in)justice, human rights, critical theory and the theorising interlocking social inequalities relating to class, gender, race and ethnicity in the context of Brazil. My research has been published in academic journals such as Contemporary Social Science, the Bulletin for Latin American Research and the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.

I am currently the principal investigator of two collaborative research projects: 

• ‘Activism and Authoritarianism: understanding the social and environmental effects of authoritarian governance from the perspective of activists in Brazil’ (funded by the Rising Stars Award, University of Brighton 2020-2021); 
• ‘The impact of criminalisation on women and feminist activist groups in Brazil’ (funded by the British Academy, 2020-2023/grant number KFSBSF\100004). 

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. 

Dr. Deanna Dadusc is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Humanities and Social Science.

Her research critically analyses the criminalisation of social movements in Europe, including the criminalisation of migrants' mutul aid, solidarity and 'facilitation' of migration. In previous years, she dedicated her work to the criminalisation of housing struggles. Her research draws on critical approaches to criminology addressing state, corporate and border violence from feminist and anti-racist perspectives. Informed by active engagement in social and political struggles, Deanna's research attempts to bring together analyses and practices of prison abolition and border abolition.

Together with Aila Spathopoulou and Camille Gendrot, Deanna co-coordinates the Migrations and Borders research area of the Feminist autonomous Centre for Research, where she also co-organises the annual 'Feminist No Borders Summer School', as well as a community course on 'Resisting the Criminalisation of Facilitation' (supported by the University of Brighton IGNITE fund). 

Deanna participated in the Erasmus+ BRIDGES consortium, which brings together Universities and Civil Society organisations to tackle exclusion and discrimination in Higher Education, by using decolonial, anti-racist and feminist approaches and methodologies. The consortium includes the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research and Za’atar in Athens;  the domestic workers union Sindillar and the Autonomous University of Barcelona; An.Ge.Kommen and the University of Giessen in Germany; the University of Brighton and the Office of Displaced Designers in the UK.

Between 2018 and 2021, Deanna coordinated the 'Social Movements and Radical Politics' strand of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE - University of Brighton).

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.

The main focus of my research is science; as it is represented in culture, as it is practiced in formal settings, and as a system of knowledge that we deploy in society. My research has been characterised as Science and Technology Studies (STS), but I prefer to think of myself as a sociologist of science, even though I go beyond traditional sociological research methods in my work.

My research uses ethnographic and cultural studies research methods – I have carried out a number of long-term ethnographic studies of science laboratories. My interest in formal science emerged from my earlier work in sociology of work which culminated in a number of books written with my colleagues Professor Harriet Bradley and Dr Steve Williams. After carrying out a large study of shop floor production workers I thought that finding a contrasting group would be interesting. I chose to look at academic scientists as they are a) incredibly productive, producing vast quantities of knowledge in the form of scientific journal articles, b) very highly qualified and c) despite having very low levels of job security are poorly unionised. My initial studies with this group of workers took a labour process approach but I soon focused on attitudes and motivations towards work, revisiting the work of Max Weber from 1918.

My interest in scientists’ work and knowledge production took me into examining climate change as a sociocultural discourse that is related to formal science and discourse. This research is ongoing as part of the Centre for Research in Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics.

Emma-Louise Jay’s research interests lie on the interface between 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 authors an imaginative blog which focuses mainly on issues relating to the Colombian political climate.

At the University of Brighton, Emma has taken on the role of Course Leader for the (Applied) Psychology program intake year (level 4), and also leads the module SS572 on Key Theoretical Foundations to Counselling and Psychotherapy. In this role she is enjoying teaching about the many different schools that inform the field of psychological medicine cross-culturally. She would like to broaden awareness of less-known therapies such as ‘Morita therapy’, ‘Logotherapy’ and 'Milton H. Ericksonian' hypnotherapy in her UK teaching.

Emma is also joint Ethics and Integrity Lead together with Rebecca Graber for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Brighton.

Emma’s research interests include existential psychology and psychotherapy, phenomenology, German idealism, dissociation, psychological medicine, critical psychology, psychoanalysis, hypnotherapy, the history of psychiatry, cross-cultural psychology and psychiatry, and most recently, political theory. She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles, a blog, and a body of narrative non-fiction, poetry and short stories.

Affiliations:

The University of Brighton’s Centre of Resilience for Social Justice (CRSJ)

My primary research focus is in the field of political economy. I am interested in ideas of ownership of resources, particularly in alternative models of public ownership informed by anarchist and Marxist traditions and how these approaches can relate to radical understandings of democracy and ‘ideal’ or ‘developmental’ conceptions of liberty. Currently I am working on projects including the application of Rousseau’s conception of the political community to the worker-owned firm, and a location of worker co-operatives in contemporary Marxist theory.

I also have a strong interest in political psychology and the application of experimental methods to empirical political theory. I am currently working on a collaborative study to explore the relationship between political leanings, epistemic belief systems and the evaluation of models of distributive justice.

My research takes place at the intersections between psychoanalytic theory, Critical Theory, cultural theory and feminist philosophy. I have a particular interest in the philosophy, theory, politics and aesthetics of reproduction and care, and the contribution that psychoanalytic understandings of subjectivity can make to academic knowledge in this area. This research focus is evident in my monograph, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care, published in the Palgrave Macmillan series, Studies in the Psychosocial, in 2022. In this project, 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.

More broadly, my research interests centre on the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and society. I am interested in exploring psychoanalytic thinking as a critical discourse in the Humanities, and as both a product, and active agent, of social and cultural change. I have an interest in 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 Freudian, Lacanian, object relations and relational approaches to psychoanalysis, 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.

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.

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.

Her current projects include work on neo-Victorianism and on reproductive politics.

My core research interest is the history of the novel, the difficult practices involved in conceptualising and analysing such a multifaceted and global narrative form. Within this large problematic, I research specific genres and movements in the novel (dystopia; science fiction; modernism and contemporaneity). I have a related interested in the intersection of literary and social history in terms of how the novel addresses/readdresses its public, and how the latter erases class forms of identity. 

To work historically but with a sensitivity to formal differences and patterns, i use critical theory, in particular the work of Theodor Adorno and contemporary practitioners of marxism - Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti and Sianne Ngai. 

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 began as a discursive-pragmatic analysis of medical errors and the construction of accountability in medical error news reporting and clinical incident reporting; she is currently expanding her work on accountability in new directions. 

I am a senior lecturer in Philosophy and Politics in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)  School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Brighton; degree leader of the Ma in War: History and Politics; editor of Contemporary Political Theory and of The Journal of Italian Philosophy. My research interests include French and Italian contemporary philosophy and thought, Black studies, Biopolitics, police power, violence and resistance.  In my first book The political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) I interrogate the relation between political ontology and violence. I am also interested in the ways in which forms of relational ontology underpin the history of contemporary critical theory and radical philosophy. I am currently working on a book in collaboration with Prof. Mark Devenney entitled Troubling Democracy: On practices of care, fugitivity, and refusal.

My recent publications include:

Marmont, G and Primera, G 'Propositions for Inoperative Life' in The Journal of Italian Philosophy, Vol 3, 2020

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

Primera, G and Lamb, M. 'Sovereignty between the Katechon and the Eschaton: Rethinking the Leviathan' in Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary N.187, 2019;

Primera, G. ‘Introduction to the Thought of Roberto Esposito’ in An Italian Philosophy Reader, eds. D. Rose and M. Lewis. London: Bloomsbury [forthcoming];

Primera, G. (2016) ‘Economic theology, Governance and Neoliberalism: The lessons of The Kingdom and the Glory’ in Praktyka Teoretyczna, Vol 2, 2016.

I have recently co-edited  a special issue for the Journal of Italian Philosophy entitled The Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Inoperativity

In previous years, I have written and published about neoliberalism, sovereignty and governmentality from the perspective of French Poststructuralism and Italian Thought. I have presented this work at specialised conferences in New York, Madrid, Bristol, Palermo and Brighton with some of the leading scholars in radical theory. Moreover, through my research on political violence and biopolitics, I have approached questions surrounding the notion of exclusion and its relation to liberal democracy. This work has allowed me to take part in post-marxist debates on Populism and radical democracy that have taken place in Buenos Aires (2015) and Brighton (2016 and 2017) within the framework of the project: Transnational Populist Politics.

Conference Presentations

• Political Theology and Inoperativity” in The Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy Joint Annual Conference, Royal Holloway, London, August 26th-27th 2019

• ‘Logistics, Biopolitics and Ordering’ in Violence, Space and the Political, National University of Ireland. Galway June 7th – 9th 2018

• ‘The signature of Secularization: The profane philosophy of Giorgio Agamben’ in London Conference in Critical Thought, London South Bank University. London, June 30th - July 1st 2017

• 'Violence, biopolitics and resistance: the meaning of violence in the work of Giorgio Agamben’ In The Meaning of Violence: International Conference. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Madrid 7th -8th March 2017

• ‘Resisting Biopolitics: Destituent Power and inoperativity’ in British Political Studies Association Conference. Hosted by CAPPE, University of Brighton. Brighton, 21st -23rd March 2016.

• ‘Extrajudicial Killings in Colombia’ in Theorising Transnational Populist Politics. Buenos Aires, 30th September – 5th October 2015.

• ‘Disposable life and neoliberalism’ in Neoliberalism and everyday life, CAPPE Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton. Brighton, September 2014.

• ‘The signature of Life: From Butler’s social ontology to Agamben’s politicization of ontology’ In Ontologies of Conflict, Critical Studies research Group. Brighton, June 2014.

• ‘Neoliberalism, Governmentality and Bare life: Homo Oeconomicus and Homo Sacer’ in Agamben, Capital, and the Homo Sacer Series: Economy, Poverty, People, Work. ACLA- New York University. New York, March 2014.

• ‘Agamben, the proper and the improper: understanding the scope of the inclusion- exclusion paradigm’ in Italian Biopolitical Theory: Life Power and Political Theology, University of West England. Bristol, 13-14 March 2014

• ‘Extra-judicial killings and bare life in Colombia’ in Understanding Conflict: Forms and Legacies of Violence, University of Brighton. Brighton, February 2014.

My background is in European politics and political sociology. I lived in Belgium, Germany and France before studying at Kent (BA) and Manchester (MSc, PhD). My book on European social movements (Against Old Europe, 2014) examined critical theory approaches to globalisation, including work by Touraine, Habermas, Negri, Holloway and Postone.

I have published widely on protest, policing and criminalisation, including on no borders activism, on the climate camps, the German far right and the covert surveillance of social movements.  My work is published in leading academic journals such as Citizenship Studies, Critical Social Policy, Environmental Politics and the European Journal of Social Theory.

My main interest at the moment is the public inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales. This should lead to a new book on the contest between disclosure and secrecy in public inquiry, contracted with Policy Press.

Another statutory inquiry that I have been interested in is the Brook House Inquiry into the mistreatment of immigration detainees. A first analysis from this study is published in Criminology & Criminal Justice.

Rebecca Searle is a contemporary historian whose work focuses on the ways in which the study of the past can be used to make critical interventions in the politics of the present.

Her current research is focussed on the housing crisis and she has recently published A Histoty of the Housing Crisis (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). She established and co-ordinates the Housing Forum, an initiative to bring together academics, community organisations and policy makers to develop local solutions to the housing crisis. She is currently contributing towards the Brighton and Hove Common Ambition project, which brings together people with lived experience of homelessness, frontline providers, and commissioners through co-production within homeless health services to improve health services and outcomes for people experiencing homelessness in Brighton & Hove. She is also working with the Brighton and Hove Land Trust on a project funded by the Civic Power Fund, that empowers local communities to interrogate recent and forthcoming developments.

Central to Rebecca's academic practice is the belief that scholars must work in partnership with their communities to tackle the many global challenges our world faces. She pursues this at the University of Brighton as Deputy Director for the Centre for Applied Politics, Philosophy and Ethics, where she supports other scholars to understand the real world practical impacts of their researach. She designed the pioneering suite of Global Challenges modules that encourages students to pursue their own research projects and find solutions to Global Challenges. In 2023, she was awarded a One Brighton Award in 2023 for research-linked teaching, in recognition of these modules. She is the Course Leader for BA Politics and Social Change and the Employability, Placements and Partnership lead for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Rebecca's other research and teaching interests include the history of gender and sexuality; the global history of contemporary capitalism; war and conflict; and the history and politics of twentieth and twenty-first century Britain.

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 and public health leadership.

My reseach interests are in contemporary literature and culture, most specifically in Black British and post-communist/'Eastern European' writing.

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

Recent publications 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) and (with Jo Hall and Vy Rajapillai), ‘Students as partners in decolonising the curriculum: lessons learnt at the University of Brighton, UK’ (Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change, 2021). I am currently working on a series of invited contributions and on my next monograph on contemporary Black British women's writing.

I have built long-lasting partnerships with local organisations, most notably with New Writing South, 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 and brightest LGBTQ+ literature festival https://coastisqueer.com/.

With Bea Hitchman and Vy Rajapillai, we've have established a new partnership with Afrori Books, Brighton's first black-owned bookstore, specialising in books by black authors https://afroribooks.co.uk/.

I am a Trustee of New Writing South and core member of the organising team for the Brighton Book Festival /https://www.brightonbookfestival.co.uk/.

Current Funded Projects

'Reading to Resist, Reading to Belong: A Space for Black Writing'- community partnership project with Afrori and Diversity Lewes (funded by AHRC Ignite) 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/

Recent events/projects/conferences

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

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, the politics of care, aesthetics, ethics, equality, extremism, transnational populism, UK politics and policy. 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 emancipatory 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 less violent world.

Clare's work currently falls under two broad themes 1) evaluating 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; 2) understanding the role of affect (e.g. love, rage, grief) in contemporary 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:

Overcoming the Motherhood Penalty

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.

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.

Wanda's (pronounced Van-da) work offers an abolitionist critique of abolitionism. Inspired by the criminalisation of rap music (UK Drill), its demonisation and blame for knife violence, she stumbles across a recurrent obstacle: is the community embroiled in policing and does it therefore reproduce the power dynamics contrary to prison-industrial complex abolitionism? How can alternatives to the criminal justice system avoid repeating carceral logic? Wanda proposes that violence is a subjectivising experience and is developing a model of psycho-sonic reconciliation.

More widely Wanda is interested in experential and decolonial ways of knowing and sharing knowledge. More specifically, she focuses on the role of music and audio based practices, her forthcoming book 'Sonic Rebellions' exploring how sound informs political action and space. As a former mental health practitioner and group facilitator, Wanda worked with rap and spoken word as tools in recovery, developed primarily for incarcerated people and those affected by the criminal justice system.

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 2011?'. 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. I have previously had articles published on the British Army's perpetration of torture and sexual violence against Iraqi children, 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.

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

My PhD comprises a critical intervention in the recent ‘turn to ethics’ in post-foundational philosophy, principally in the work of Judith Butler. This research examines political responses to precarity through a different theorisation of the relationship between ethics and morality than that provided by Butler. This project reworks Butler’s theorisation of precarity with recourse to Adorno’s critique of morality. It argues that starting with the somatic makes possible a moral theory that begins neither with ontology nor with ethics. Rather, it begins with political responsiveness to the moral impulse that emerges from the somatic experience of suffering.

My PhD research is funded by the ESRC's South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership. The research will investigate the relationship between the consumption of gig-economy goods and services and the social pathology of alienation. The aim is to undertake a comparative study of the UK and Iceland, conducting interviews and focus groups, to illuminate how consumption and alienation within the gig-economy environment is experienced in different societal contexts. 

My PhD research looks at the queer affects, practices and relations found in rural areas, and is based in both the School of Humanities and the School of Environment and Technology at the University of Brighton.

Academic understandings of sexuality often privilege urban centres as places where queer sex flourishes, which builds the assumption that sex must be visible and performed in order to be understood. My research challenges this metronormative link between ‘urbanity’ and ‘sex’. Instead, I explore ‘grey’, less-visible areas between sexual and non-sexual, somewhere and nowhere, and assert the queerness of non-metropolitan, ‘green’ areas.

My research interests can be categorised into 3 areas, all of which I approach using queer theory:

Asexualities and Nonsexualities

What can asexual people, communities and experiences teach us about sex, sexuality, desire and gender? Asexual people do not experience sexual attraction to others. Their livelihoods, perspectives and politics can therefore help us to critique systems of social and sexual control, like compulsory heterosexuality for example. I am interested in exploring the relations that people who do not experience sexual attraction have to 'sex' as a social function of power.

I'm also interested in understanding 'nonsexual' ways of being, and uncovering their radical politics. Unlike asexuality, all people engage with nonsexual ways of relating and feeling. What happens when we understand friendship, romance or even loneliness as nonsexualities?

Rural Queer Studies

The countryside is often seen as a place that lacks queerness, or at least opportunities through which to live queerly. Even so, many queer people continue to live in rural areas. In fact, non-metropolitan space plays host to some very deviant and dissident sexualities and experiences, whose queerness remains underappreciated.

I'm currently researching how one can respond to this tendency, and am doing so by studying queer relations, affects and identities in one rural area in SW England. I question the dominance of 'lack' and 'absence' in defining rural queer space, and am working towards new ways on conceptualising 'rural queer'.

Feminist, Queer, Spatial and Critical Theory

My interest in theory is wide-ranging but is most powerfully informed by queer theory. My research attempts to queer concepts and learn from the margins, but it is also informed by intersectional and abolitionist feminist thinking, as well as poststructural and postmodern understandings of space, place and philosophy. As such my research has previously engaged with: Butler, Foucault, Haraway, Massey, Halperin, Sedgwick, Halberstam, Ahmed, Lorde, Deleuze and Guattari.

     My main concern in this research process is to investigate how sovereign power is the origin of violence and evil, how it legitimizes its authority, sanctifies itself, and condemns its citizens to obedience. It is important to see how sovereign power creates meanings and through these meanings how it envelops and limits people's lives, and moreover, how threatens them. It is also necessary to reveal how sovereign power takes away the absolute freedom of the human race by force or indirectly through persuasion methods. Thus, the anticipated ultimate contribution of the study to the research field will be to emphasize and reveal why a new world order in which the sovereign state is not effective is necessary and important. In this context, the desire of a new world order needs vital justifications such as to understand and reveal the origin of the modern world's evil in which the sovereign powers dominate.      As a matter of fact, even under the regimes that are called ideal regimes, people are the object of violence and they are subjected to all these by the state institutions and security forces. However, in the Middle East, the debates on regional and political order are generally addressed through elements that will ensure the statehood and interstate issues. Most of these debates are shaped around how these elements should be or the quest for an ideal regime. However, I believe that it should be discussed that the origins of the evil that people are exposed in this geography to despite the many different regimes are whether the elements of the regimes (economic, juridical, political and religious) and the relations of states with each other or the sovereign power, the sovereign state is itself.      I think that in line with this purpose Agamben’s argument presents a significant scope to make sense of main issues such as terror, terror and state relations, endless war and violence in the Middle East despite their different regimes. He argues that the origin of all kinds of violence, control, surveillance, and oppression is neither religion nor law; it is biopolitical sovereigns. Moreover, according to him, the secret root of the regimes that are called ideal regimes comes to light with its secret biopolitical character, a character that presents itself as a bearer of the rights and formal liberties. In this context, Agamben's theory provides ontological elements of the biopolitics and governmentality that entail the world to a global civil war and reveal the metaphysical basis that prepares the ground for violence (Agamben, 1998). By following this perspective it can be possible to examine and reveal how the sovereign powers have abused citizen's rights through the power to recognize rights, and how they justify their violence by a paradoxical exclusion.      Ultimately, the fact that this study reveals the real face of sovereigns in some special regions in the Middle East in all its details will explain why there is an objection to the modern order dominated by the sovereign powers.

In recent years, abolitionist and populist political movements have been the dominant narratives in North American, European and South American politics. This project investigates political resistance at the intersections of abolition, populism and deconstruction. It draws on the similarities between these fields to theorise political resistances that extend beyond governance as their central tenet. The project examines how contemporary forms of activism (from BLM, Trans-activism, communes, indigenous land-resource relations, transformative justice, fugitive living and mutual aid networks) remake logics of violence, dispossession and destitution.

Consequently this project rethinks democracy as a framework for understanding resistances which extend beyond but not without governance. By not delimiting the sphere of resistance, I develop an account of democracy-as-resistance which resists the logics of racial capital, heteropatriarchy, (neo)colonialism, and property.

I have also researched the politics of populist discourse in the UK between 2014-2019; and the history of immunity and auto-immunity in political theory for two separate research projects co-ordinated by the School of Humanities and CAPPE.

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 third year PhD researcher at the University of Brighton, situated in the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics. My research sits at the intersection of environmental and health policy, race and cultural studies, and human geography. Through feminist postructural policy analysis I am critically exploring the absent-presence of 'race' in English environmental and health policy. My PhD specifically explores the problem representation of racialised inequalities in access to nature in England. 

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

The dialectics of gay liberation in Britain in the sixties and seventies 

My PhD research focuses on the history of the gay liberation movement in Britain and the visions of revolutionary social change it sought to theorise and embody. The project takes a dialectical approach to theory and history, combining marxist critical theory and an engagement with the articles, pamphlets, ephemera and photographs located in archives of the gay movement across the UK. Crucially, I am interested in how records and traces of gay life and gay experience during this period actively contribute to theories of sexuality, gender and capitalism and the short-circuiting of their interrelations. My aim is to situate and historicise these contributions according to the twists and turns of capital accumulation and class struggle in the late twentieth century with the view to rubbing against the grain of normative and progressivist narratives of gay history that dominate the present. The project is funded by the TECHNE/AHRC consortium.

I am also a founding editor of Invert Journal, an independent journal of contemporary marxist thought focused on the abolition of gender and the liberation of feminised subjects.

My current research is practice-based, working towards the development of a collection of poetic writing that contributes to the current cultural and artistic movement challenging speciesist and anthropocentric ideologies as part of a wider response to the current climate crisis.

My theoretical interests are in how poetry and experimental forms of writing can help to challenge patriarchal and anthropocentric hegemony, in particular how these ideologies relate to the language of oppositional binarism. This is largely informed by psychoanalytic feminism, specifically the work of Helene Cixous, and by ecofeminist understandings of the human/nature binary, and how these categories might intersect with other binarisms both within and outside of the academy. As part of this, I am exploring the political and intellectual significance of hybrid forms of writing, particularly those that can be defined as both critical and creative. 

My research utilises a walking methodology that is accountable to decolonial, feminist, and queer theories, as a way of decentering the human as well as Eurocentric, heteronormative, and masculinist knowledges.

My research project is an interdisciplinary critique of neoliberal capitalist time-regimes. I build upon the work of Judith Butler in order to examine the correlations between the unlivability of present-day precaritisation and what Hartmut Rosa calls social acceleration. My investigation also draws from Jonathan Crary, and Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben.

My general interests span across the fields of Contemporary Political Philosophy, Critical Theory and Studies on Neoliberalism. I am also interested in the ethics and politics that run through the phenomena of overwork: from voluntary self-exploitation to coercive sweatshop labour.

My doctoral research engages with already recorded visual and spoken testimonies of Shaheen Bagh protestors, predominantly Muslim women - mothers, grandmothers, neighbours - and children who occupied a public highway in Delhi for 101 continuous days between December 2019 and March 2020 as part of the nationwide anti-CAA movement in India.

Whilst the protests were catalysed by the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP party’s passing of the Islamophobic Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) and the subsequent police brutality faced by students local to the Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood in South Delhi for protesting against its passing, I argue that protestors' praxis stretched far beyond this, towards intervening in an subverting the coloniality of the nation-state of India materially and epistemically. Thus, the praxis Shaheen Bagh offers hope for thinking, being, living, and doing otherwise.

My research is funded by the AHRC Techne DTP.

Chara's research interests fall under the umbrella of pragmatics, that is the study of meaning in context. Her work evolves around relevance theory, a theory of communication and cognition, and how this framework can be applied to aesthetics and the interpretation of art. In particular, her work focuses on the communication of the ineffable in literature, artworks, and aesthetic experiences. In her thesis, she also explores the influence of neuroaesthetics, ekphrastic poetry, and the meaning of the Parthenon Sculptures. Chara's work has been influenced by a recent affective turn in relevance-theoretic pragmatics and Dr Tim Wharton's work on pragmatics and emotion.The working title of her doctoral thesis is Art, affect, and mind: Inferring the ineffable. 

I am interested in the way in which modern property relations violently shape lives and relationships and how to move beyond that - as a political project not just an intellectual exercise. This includes research into how to theorise history and how to historize the present.

In my dissertation I look at property’s violence, i.e. how property materializes in and through our (gendered, sexualised and racialised) relationships with others, ourselves and our bodies, – and try to excavate (imagined) alternatives. Therefore, I look at the continuities of historical regimes of property. Here, ownership struggles in colonial capitalism are central; more specifically in my case, constellations of property and kinship in German colonial (after)lives. The role of colonial intervention in sexuality, family and inheritance structures in the context of dispossession and propertisation brings out (struggles around) articulations of race, gender and class and the properties of body and nation(/state-building). Thus, I am interested in how the past lives on and how we might (fight to) live differently in the now.