Who we are

Drawing on a background in literary history and cultural studies, Cathy Bergin's primary research interests are in the politics of 'race' and colonialism in  African-American and Caribbean writing, focussing on cultural formations and Communist politics in the 20th Century. She is particularly interested in the concept of 'rage' as the expression of black historical consciousness and agency.

Cathy has lectured in historical and critical studies at the university since 2005 and organises the long-standing Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics research seminar series.

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.

Tom Bunyard’s primary research interests are focussed on the theoretical work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and on Debord’s central concept of ‘spectacle’. In 2011, he completed a PhD on this topic at Goldsmiths, University of London. The thesis traced the genealogy of Debord’s theory, interpreted it through its primary theoretical and philosophical influences, and foregrounded the central importance of time, history and praxis to Debord’s thought. Tom has recently completed a monograph on this topic. Titled Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory, the book reconstructs and evaluates the conceptual framework that underlies Debord’s claims. In doing so, it places particular emphasis on the Hegelian and existential dimensions of Debord’s work, and focusses on his concerns with historical agency.

This study of the Debord’s work has led to an interest in the temporality of modern society, and related notions of social pathology. Tom is currently pursuing this by looking at new readings of Hegel’s philosophy, and at contemporary ‘value-form’ interpretations of Marx’s mature work. More broadly, his interests include: Marx and Marxism; Hegelian philosophy; existentialism; aesthetics and the avant-garde; continental philosophy; cultural and critical theory; philosophy of history.

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 recent 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 am currently co-editing a book, with Dr Zeina Maasri and Dr Cathy Bergin, provisionally titled Transnational Solidarity: Decentring the Sixties, 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.

Dr. Nicola Clewer is a lecturer in the School of Humanities. Her research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. More specifically, her work to date has interrogated the philosophical, political and aesthetic dimensions of memorialisation in the neoliberal conjuncture. Her current research explores the relationship between neoliberalism and the rise of the far-right through the lens of the aesthetic concept of the sublime.

My research has focused on the relationships of cultural texts to nations and transnational movements and most recently has concerned the cultural representations of work and workers. 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 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. 

My book Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel (Palgrave,  2017) explores how regimes of flexible labour in the contemporary economy have been represented in English-language fiction about office work in a range of national contexts. I am currently developing this area of research in a project on the concept of intimate economies; looking at various forms of intimate labour, this work attempts to explore how cultural texts have narrated and defined the changing boundary between the economic and the non-economic during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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

Her research analyses the criminalisation of social movements in Europe, including the criminalisation of migrants' solidarity and of housing struggles. Her research is informed by critical approaches to criminology addressing state, corporate and border violence from feminist and anti-racist perspectives. 

Together with Dr. Eleni Dimou and Prof. Pierpaolo Mudu, Deanna is currently co-authoring a book titled ‘’Borders, Repression and Resistance: the criminalisation of migrants’ solidarity’’ (Routledge, forthcoming).

Deanna paricipates 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.

Deanna coordinates 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. Dunford and Neu co-ordinate an emerging network which looks at how nonviolent approaches offer a more effective and justifiable alternative for protecting civilian victims of atrocity 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.

I work across the fields of visual and cultural politics and design history with a particular attention on Lebanon and the Middle East. My investigation is historically focused on post-1945 anticolonial struggles, transnational anti-imperialist solidarities and violent conflicts, as complicated by a global Cold War order. I approach the Middle East less as a discrete area study but rather as a political geography interconnected with global conditions of modernity, (post)coloniality, war and conflict.

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 current research explores the relationship between theories of subjectivity and Critical Theory. I am interested in how understandings of subjectivity shape both social policy and critical theories of emancipation, with a particular focus on ideas about child development, gender, intersectionality and care. This research will be published in a monograph I am currently completing for the Palgrave Macmillan series, Studies in the Psychosocial, titled Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care (due in September 2021).

More broadly, my research interests include psychoanalytic theory and praxis; psychoanalysis and social justice; the politics of mental health; Critical Theory; feminist theory; gender studies; cultural studies; the politics of reproduction and care. Much of my research to date has taken place at the intersections of these preoccupations, culminating in several articles that address these themes.

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; left-wing populism; and, populism and political subjects.

Andy is also working on a longer-term historical project on individualism, drawing in Hobbes, Locke, Defoe and Swift, Smith, Bentham, Mill, Hobhouse, Hayek and other neoliberals.

Research interests also include Laclau, Mouffe, discourse theory, radical democracy, 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 the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in women's writing 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 the philosophy of friendship and on reproductive politics.

Dr Chrystie Myketiak examines language in use in order to uncover what its form, function, and structure tells us about interaction, structural inequalities, and 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. 

Dr Michael Neu researches in political and moral philosophy, with special interests in the politics and ethics of violence. He has published on contemporary just war theory, the "Responsibility to Protect", sweatshops, torture and the notion of "complicity". His current research is on "friendship".

I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Brighton, where I teach critical theory and political philosophy. My research interests include French and Italian contemporary philosophy and thought, Black studies, Biopolitics, the politics of War and violence and political theology. In my first book The political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben (London:Bloomsbury, 2019) I interrogate the relation between radical philosophy, archaeology and political ontology. Indeed, I am interested in the ways in which forms of relational ontology underpin the history of contemporary critical theory and radical philosophy.

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.

Naomi Salaman is an artist, curator and lecturer. Her work investigates art practice, pedagogy and cultural institutions using historical, critical and feminist perspectives. She has a doctorate in Visual Arts Practice, on the history of art theory in the art school from Goldsmiths College, supervised by Victor Burgin. She is currently working on an archive and publication project on the history of the Fine Art Critical Practice course, and is developing SWEETSHOP an artist run window gallery in Lewes, where she lives.

Raphael’s research is in the areas of protest and social movements, criminology and criminal justice, and social and political theory. He is the author of a book on European social movements (Against Old Europe, Routledge) and he has published widely on protest, policing and critical theory. His work has been published in leading academic journals such as Citizenship Studies, Critical Social Policy, Social Movement Studies, Environmental Politics, Sociology Compass and the European Journal of Social Theory.

He currently leads a research project that scrutinises the public inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales, with initial funds coming from Brighton University's Rising Stars Award. Raphael was interviewed about the research on the European TV network ARTE and has provided expert commentary on the delays and secrecy clouding the inquiry in the Independent, the Conversation and a range of blogs.

Previously he has received the Colin Seymour-Ure prize for his undergraduate thesis from the University of Kent, a four-year studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for his doctoral research at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Nottingham.

Raphael currently serves on the Editorial Board of Sociology Research Online (since 2015) and on the Management Board of the university's Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics. He is a member of the British Society of Criminology, the Socio-Legal Studies Association, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Rebecca Searle is a 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. 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 aims to tackle issues in healthcare for people facing homelessness. Her research interests include the history of the housing crisis; the global history of contemporary capitalism; the history of twentieth century Britain; and war and conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the Course Leader for BA Politics and Social Change. 

Zöe Sutherland’s main research is on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary artistic practice, focusing on the complex ‘global’ character of this period. Zöe's specialism is in the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s-70s, often taken to be the index of art’s ‘globalisation’. By situating Conceptual Art within a more general and heterogenous ‘conceptualist’ tendency inherent to postwar artistic practice in many parts of the world, Zöe’s work attempts to trace the varying manifestations—and resistances—to the conceptual form that emerged through the radical politics and aesthetics of different regions.

Zöe also writes about feminist theory and politics, focusing on issues of gender, social reproduction, reproductive labour and reproductive technologies. Her emerging research interests are around the intersection of gender, race, class and old age, analysing the set of complex and varied trajectories—relation to work, reproductive labour, the family, state benefits—that impact upon socio-economic positions in later life. She is especially interested in how the triple problem of the financial crisis, the housing crisis and the issue of an ageing population will impact economically, psychologically and emotionally in the near future, and what kind of radical alternatives to housing for the elderly might be possible.

Zöe's broader research interests include continental philosophy, critical theory, the global history of contemporary capitalism and historical forms of radical and revolutionary politics. She is the Module co-ordinator for ‘The History of Sex and Gender’ on the BA (Hons) Critical Histories degree within the Humanities programme.

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.

Clare Woodford is Principal Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)  School of Humanities, University of Brighton; director of the CAPPE Critical Theory research group strand; degree leader for BA (Hons) Philosophy, Politics and Ethics; and co-editor of Rowman and Littlefield’s Polemics series. She is the author of articles and chapters on democratic theory, aesthetics, ethics, equality, extremism, transnational populism, UK politics and policy. Her book Disorienting democracy: politics of emancipation (2017, London; 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. Towards a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence (2021, New York: Fordham) brings together the work of Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig with contemporary feminist, gender theory and political theology, to argue that we need to rethink inter-relational politics, and attend more carefully to political infrastructural organisation, if we are to construct a less violent world. She is currently working on three projects - theorising transnational populism and its juxtaposition with the democratic politics of equality; love, desire and reproduction in democratic theories of the subject, drawing on economic theory, gender politics and political theology; and a critique of UK counter-terrorism policy from the perspective of radical democratic theory. Clare works at the interstices of political philosophy, poststructuralism and democratic and gender theory.

Clare’s research is primarily motivated by concern about the relationship between inequality and violence and unrest and how this plays out in advanced capitalist democracy. In a more general sense she is fascinated by concepts of social order and disorder; finitude and the edges of being and knowledge; the inter-play of faith, reason, belief and action; performance and politics 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 is available to supervise PhDs in any of the above areas. Please email enquiries to c.woodford@brighton.ac.uk.

Current PhD funding opportunities:

https://www.southcoastdtp.ac.uk/apply/

http://www.techne.ac.uk/

https://unialliance.ac.uk/dta/futuresocieties/

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.

I studied Philosophy long ago. I was once a humanitarian worker in contexts of armed conflict and forced displacement. I am now a PhD researcher at the School of Humanities, University of Brighton. 

My research project explores the intersections of feminist peace research, feminist political ecology, environmental peacebuilding and decolonial feminisms. I look at the nexus conflict-women-nature-peace-memory through two main conceptual frameworks: the continuum territory-body and the conflict capital-life as framed in feminismos territoriales from Latin America as well as other feminisms that explore the linkages between environmental justice, gender justice and peacebuilding in contexts of (post)colonial war and occupation. To do so, I depart from women’s everyday praxes of peace and resistance to gender and environmental military and extractive violence. 

My areas of interest are the gender and environmental impacts of armed conflict, military industries and extractives as well as women’s everyday praxes of resistance and peacebuilding as life-nature-territory defenders and artists, particularly in the Northwest of Africa.

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.  

My Ph.D. work investigates the connection between the dialogical constitution of reasons and the capacity to refuse life-saving treatment in patients suffering from anorexia nervosa. I have research interest in moral and political philosophy (with a distinct focus on questions of identity, pluralism, multiculturalism, oppression, and vulnerability), epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, and psychiatric disorders. I am particularly interested in the application of Wittgenstein's thought in ethics and in Charles Taylor's expressivist conception of language.

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 project is about citizenship and speculative narratives. I study how subjects are produced, interpellated, and propagated by narratives, including fictional and non-fictional texts, a threshold that I call into question. I see citizenship as an apparatus for the production and regulation of proprietary subjects, and I consider the complicities and refusals of this in speculative texts. To do this, I draw on deconstruction, queer theory, black studies, trans* theory, and post-Marxism.

I am a PhD researcher in Political Theory in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics (CAPPE) in the School of Humanities. My project is funded by University of Brighton Doctoral Studentship.

 Together with Harrison Lechley, I co-founded and edited Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought & Radical Politics. For the inaugural issue, I interviewed Judith Butler on her recent book “The Force of Nonviolence.” I have presented my work at specialized conferences in Augsburg, Galway, Brighton and during my research visit at University of California, Berkeley. I also organized a number of funded conferences and workshops in the England, Germany and the US on questions of democratic theory, including challenges of immigration and far-right extremism.

I am a doctoral tutor at the School of Law, Politics & Sociology, University of Sussex, and have taught modules in Philosophy, Social and Political Theory, and Criminology. 

 My doctoral research project investigates the notion of political authority. Over the course of the work, I conceptualize political leadership proper to democratic regimes and distinguish it from authoritarian forms. My work responds to a lack of a conceptual space for political authority in contemporary democratic thought. Without such a concept, I argue, we are not able to grasp and resist current authoritarian trends in liberal democratic regime. Furthermore, I contend that political authority provides democratic thought with the vocabulary to engage critically political categories such as the state; leadership; and institutions; whilst at the same time recognizing their hierarchical and inegalitarian structures. 

For my project, I focus on the thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt, engaging post-structuralist critique (Jacques Derrida, Cedric Robinson, Bonnie Honig) to draw out a radical post-foundationalism in their work. I argue that both Schmitt and Arendt take Weber’s critique of authority further; whilst Schmitt, however, ultimately abandons the notion of authority for decisionism, Arendt recognizes its significance and provides a modern reconceptualization of authority. 

 More broadly, my research is concerned with the structural order of democratic regimes, including institutions and political leadership, and its relation to radical democratic thought and resistance. I am intrigued by the conceptual limits of political categories such as democracy, authoritarianism and totalitarianism. My expertise covers post-foundational political thought in the 20th century in Germany – particularly also the thought of Martin Heidegger – and France – particularly Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière. 

I am looking to develop further my critique of charismatic leadership, which draws on Cedric Robinson and Erica R. Edwards, to investigate the role of the leader in populist movements. Furthermore, during my research visit at University of California, Berkeley, I studied the work of Freud and Lacan under Prof Mary Ann Doane. I want to connect this to feminist theories of relationality and refusal (Adriana Cavarero, Bonnie Honig and Judith Butler) to critically engage with the patriarchal authority and order. 

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.

Self-nelgect is a health and social care condition involving individuals, usually older adults, who, in some way, take insufficient care of themselves to an extent that is detrimental to their health. This condition takes a variety of forms including a lack of personal hygiene, poor nutrition and unmaintained home environments. Self-neglect is addressed under the Care Act 2014 within Safeguarding Adults through the application of specific sets of procedures which usually prioritise Mental Capacity Assessments. In practice, however, this condition presents a complexity of ethical dilemmas and challenegs which, whilst not unique within health and social care, come together in specific ways for self-neglect.

This thesis suggests that the problematic nature of self-neglect emerges from the legal, medical and conceptual framing employed. Despite their being underpinned by Human Rights concerns these frames lead to ageist, unjust and depersonalising practices based on pre-conceived moral assumptions and are detrimental to the individuals involved whose views are silenced.

This study constructs a thicker frame for self-neglect by starting with the views and understandings of individuals who self-neglect. It argues that both self-care and a lack of self-care are habitual activities that can change over time in response to physical and social experiences and as a consequence of decisions made, for some reasons, about other things. In this context the condition self-neglect becomes less about the individual's lack of capacity and capability to self-care, or stop self-neglecting. It becomes more about embodied beings constructed by their self-care and lack of self-care experiences who are positively coping with living a life. As such it offers the opportunity to identify different, less problematic approaches to self-neglect practice and intervention by health and social care practitioners 

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.

My research, 'Iterations of Queerness: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf's Life and Work in Post-1990 Cinema', looks to decompose and denaturalise the 'chrononormative' (Freeman 2010: xi) temporal order through examining the temporalities present in filmic adaptation of Virginia Woolf's life and work. This research will involve comparatively analysing the queer temporalities present witihin many of Woolf's novels with the temporal formations in a number of the films in my data set. In addition to troubling chrononormativity, my work will look to examine the relationship between medium, queer politics and storytelling practices. I see the audience of my work as being academics working in queer theory, film studies and Woolf studies as well as queer artists looking to work with the forms of the film and the novel.

 I adopt an interdisciplinary frame, working at the intersection of literature and film studies, queer theory, Comparative Political Thought, Continental Philosophy and Adaptation Studies. My researches operationalises a specifi rhythm-focused queer temporal approach I have named hypererotorhythmic queer analysis. This approch draws heavily on the work of Freeman, Freccero, Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault and Lefebvre.

Areas I am interested in researching in future include film adaptations of the work of Proust, the queer historical/biographical stratergies of Lytton Strachey, the queer potential of Pierre Bourdieu and the queer rhythms of the work of Woolf.

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.

I am generally interested in the fields related to theories and politics of emancipatory transition production, particularly, in-between (post) marxism and (lacanian) psychoanalysis.

Working title

The Purloined Letters for Transitional Analysis: Towards a Theory and Politics of Emancipatory Production

Thesis works

This research explores, via the Lacaninan framework, the problems of theory, method and strategy that make the production of emancipatory transition and transformation possible and the ideological circle’s subsumption of this impossible. In the appendix of Reading Capital, Althusser suggests the problem of the theory of transition from one mode of social production to another as the most urgent problem in research in Marxism. This could sound like an outdated problem because it was posed so long ago, as it were, before the collapse of so-called real socialism and the Berlin Wall crashed down with brick dust. And yet, I think which is rather why this problem would be crucially one of the inevitable and urgent problems in emancipatory politics; there is a need for the consideration of why this question was raised. This is because, without the theory and question of emancipatory transition production, the practical-critical activities would risk and be still embedded in the reproduction of the existing dominant social structure by the ideological circle’s subsumption. In this case, “it has made of the proletariat not the gravedigger, but the savior of capitalism” (Castoriadis). For this reason, how and why it is possible to produce emancipatory transition and transformation without being limited to the ideological mise-en-abîme structure’s subsumption could still be a horizon which constitutes contemporary tasks of emancipatory politics.

In this thesis, these problems are unfolded across four areas split as two fields: the theoretical formation (e.g. the question of ‘theoretical’ ‘mode of production’), the social formation, the subject formation and the political formation. And, two fields are, as it were, the emancipatory theory of history of social formation and that of history of theoretical formation entangled within the former problem. This process aims to unwittingly reconstitute Althusser’s renewal of Marxism via ‘symptomatic reading’, examining the theoretical practices of post/marxists and deconstructive inheritances. I hope this textual work could, perhaps, make the puppet’s hands move together and re-write certain letters: the purloined letters for transitional analysis and emancipatory production.

My thesis, On Being Equally Different, concerns the theoretical relations between the concepts of 'equality' and 'difference'. I critically examine the 'politics of difference' and 'diversity politics', both of which treat 'difference' and/or 'diversity' as a principal normative value; over other values, such as equality. Theorists within these traditions have offered a critique of equality for undermining difference by predetermining the criterion by which social groups are admitted within an egalitarian ideal. Whilst taking this critique seriously, defending difference or diversity for their own sake is problematic, if not self-defeating. I argue that a revised conception of equality is needed to do sufficient justice to difference and diversity, and must precede them as an ethical commitment.

In addition to my thesis, I am interested in the history of gay & lesbian studies and queer theory; sex and sexuality; and post-Marxist politics. 

With a background in comparative literature and literary theory, I trace patterns and trends in western perceptions of south-eastern Europe. I currently research representations of Montenegro, from the nineteenth century up to the present, through both global postcolonial and decolonial as well as regional balkanist discourse criticism. I take into consideration cultural, historical, political, geopolitical and economic contexts that shape western responses to south-eastern Europe. My research interests also focus on cultural memory and how transgenerational histories and narratives create ethnic, national and cultural identities of individuals.

• Ana Živković, “Early British Discursive Constructions of Montenegro (1840-1880)”, in Antonello Biagini and Giovanna Motta, eds, Empires and Nations from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, Volume 2 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), pp. 185-192.  http://www.cambridgescholars.com/empires-and-nations-from-the-eighteenth-to-the-twentieth-century-2