Who we are

Matt's research focus interests include human-nature and human-animal relations, multispecies, posthumanities, animal studies, human and more-than-human worlds and animist worldviews - especially in the context of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene. His teaching focus overlaps with his research interests, and incorporates ecopsychology, ecotherapy, critical environmental psychology and mental health.

From October 2022 - May 2024 he is undertaking an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship, titled 'Pavlov and the kingdom of dogs: Storying experimental animal histories through arts-based research'. His focus will be the development of creative, arts-based and visual methods to critically explore the experiences of animals in scientific research.

Dr Nicola Ashmore is a Principal Lecturer in Art and Design History. Her research and curatorial interests include collective remakings of Picasso’s Guernica for social change and creative practices for sustainable international development. She is committed to working collaboratively and developing international networks of artists and institutions interested in progressing the use of arts and culture for social change.

Nicola has made use of film documentary and digital technologies as research methodologies, investigating collaborative art practices and site-specific community artworks. She has published in several journals and has enjoyed co-authoring various publications.

Phil Ashworth is a Professor of Physical Geography specialising in river morphodynamics and sedimentology. His research interests span a range of scales including the largest rivers and estuaries in the world. He focusses on the field quantification of alluvial morphodynamics, the diversity of large river pattern and the application of fluvial sedimentology in characterising reservoir heterogeneity. This work has been supported by 16 NERC grants and several contracts from the petroleum industry.

Recently completed projects include quantifying the relationship between fluvial processes and preserved sedimentology in the world’s largest rivers, quantifying the morphodynamics and sedimentology of large estuaries and assessing the impacts of drought in South Africa.

Ongoing projects that are still being written-up are quantifying bedform dynamics in unsteady flows and modelling how sediment suspension controls the morphology and evolution of sand-bed rivers. He currently holds two NERC grants: (1) Propagation of hydro-geomorphic disturbances through continental-scale river basins: Future evolution of the Amazon River and its floodplain (started 1 December 2020, 3 years, 8 months) with Andrew Nicholas and Rolf Aalto; and (2) The evolution of global flood hazard and risk (started 1 May 2021, 5 years) with a consortium of investigators in 8 other universities [Large Grant, NE/S015655/1, twitter; website]

Phil's research projects have been based in Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and USA, and earlier work focussed on experimental modelling of braided rivers in a tilting, aggrading stream table.

Dr Harriet Atkinson is a historian of art and design. Her research concerns government and official engagements with art and design; art, design and cultural diplomacy; the development and professionalisation of design practice; art, design and dress for propaganda and protest; and histories of exhibitions and world's fairs.

Harriet is currently initiating new projects. The first is a curatorial project, in collaboration with Clare Cumberlidge, that develops new public engagement from her research into art and design activism in Britain, 1933-53. The second is a new book provisionally entitled Lost and Found: the biography of a family album, exploring personal photographs and the politics of memory, reflections sparked by a family album returned to Harriet by a stranger in 2022 and a viral tweet.

Harriet was Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow and Principal Investigator (2019-2023), leading the project '"The Materialisation of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953'. This resulted in the book Showing resistance: propaganda and Modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 (in production with Manchester University Press, due 2024); a chapter for co-edited book British Writing, Propaganda, and Cultural Diplomacy in the Second World War and Beyond (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Academic); co-edited book Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges Through Art, Architecture and Design from 1945, with Dr Verity Clarkson(Brighton) and Dr Sarah Lichtman (Parsons) (Bloomsbury, 2022).

During the Fellowship Harriet made documentary film Art on the Streets, co-directed with Jane Dibblin, narrated by Michael Rosen and made with filmmakers Four Corners, which launched in September 2023. View the trailer here. The film is currently showing as part of the Peter Laszlo Peri show at Kunsthaus Dahlem Gallery until January 2024. The film is Winner 'Best Documentary Short' Luleå International Film Festival Sweden 2023; Winner 'Best Documentary Short' California International Shorts Festival, 2023; Finalist 'Best Short Documentary' of the New York International Film Awards 2023; Finalist Berlin International Art Film Festival 2023; Official Selection Berlin Women Cinema Festival 2023; Official Selection Miami Women Film Festival 2023; and Official Selection LA Independent Women Film Awards 2023. Cultural historian Professor Joanna Bourke described Art on the Streets as: ‘A documentary for our times. Aesthetically beautiful, politically gripping, and inspiring', while Financial Times Architecture and Design critic Edwin Heathcote described it as 'a life-affirming view of the capacity of art and design to provide hope in the darkest circumstances'.

Harriet's podcast series Graphic Interventions is available on Soundcloud, ITunes, Google Podcasts and Spotify. 

Duncan is a part-time Principal Lecturer and Climate Literacy Champion based at the University of Brighton. He is a qualified Chartered RIBA Architect who has practised, researched, and taught around issues of sustainable design, the Circular Economy and closed-loop systems for over 25 years. He has worked on projects as diverse as 'The Greenwich Millennium Village' in London with Ralph Erskine, the RIBA’s ‘House of the Future’, and more recently the multi-award-winning New Country House & Estate Master Plan in Hadlow Down East Sussex. Author of ‘The Re-Use Atlas: a designer’s guide towards a circular economy’ published by RIBA, he is perhaps best known for a series of thought-provoking ‘house’ projects testing issues of sustainable design and resource management including 'The House that Kevin Built’ in 2008 and ‘The Brighton Waste House’ in 2014.

Duncan is currently the Principal Investigator for two separate Interreg research programmes. One considers the viability of local waste flows to be processed into insulation for the social housing sector. The other, in partnership with Rotor DC of Brussels tests ideas associated with deconstructing late 20th Century/ early 21st Century buildings and re-constructing them. He lectures widely on issues relating to sustainable development and the circular economy in the design and construction industries. In December 2018 Duncan delivered a keynote address ‘Designers can save Planet Earth’ at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College. He is the curator of the annual ‘Waste Zone’ at FutureBuild; a three-day symposium and exhibition focusing on discussing many of the most pressing issues presenting the emerging concept of Circular Cities, involving over 50 invited speakers including Prof. Walter Stahel, Prof. Michael Braungart, Clare Ollerenshaw (LWARB), Gillie Hobbs (BRE), Dr. Zoe Laughlin (Inst.of Making) and David Benjamin of New York’s ‘The Living’.

Duncan’s research tests the viability of a number of practices and materials, recognising the potential of discarded “waste” as a valuable resource in the future of construction, as well as live projects as valuable teaching aides. Through his projects he fosters community development and regeneration, working with apprentice builders and students, informing young people of all ages as to their role in sustainable living. Duncan creates examples of community practice that, through the use of innovative techniques such as ‘resource mapping’ can redefine what local materials are and match them with local skills and trades.

Duncan has taught at both undergraduate and post-graduate level since 1994, recently running an undergraduate design studio at the School of Architecture & Design, as well as coordinating undergraduate Technology & Professional Practices modules. His research practice informs his teaching, and vice versa. Duncan recently coordinated the design and construction of the multi-award-winning Brighton Waste House with over 360 undergraduate students, volunteers, and apprentices. As well as being a successful ‘live project’ and pedagogic tool, it is also Europe’s first permanent building made of waste material and the host of a number of funded on-going research projects.

I trained as an architect and practice as an artist, whose practice often engages with the public realm.

My recent practice and research has explored material poetics, memory, heritage and regeneration. In my PhD, 'Détour and Retour: Practices and poetics of salt as narratives of relation and re-generation in Brixton', I proposed that a 'poetics of re-generation' could allow a renegotiation of the instrumentalised term regeneration, expanding the language of regeneration and spatialising relational practice to emphasise an ethics of regeneration practices.

Therefore from a practice perspective, I'm interested in how artistic interventions and critical spatial practices that highlight and reveal poetics of place could contribute to more ethical and effective models of regeneration (including a more ethical engagement with pasts of a place, spectral traces and relation to the new).

I'm currently working on Acts of Transfer, a practice-based research project, funded by Arts Council England, and the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at UoB, in collaboration with Dr Lizzie Lloyd (UWE), into the spaces and subjectivities of socially engaged practice and critical writing about the practice.

Through my PhD I became involved with the work of the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant and his poetics of Relation. I'm currently working on research that seeks to understand how we can take Glissant's ideas into spatial and social practice in art and architecture.

I'm interested in the material cultures of migration and trade - which connect the historical and present - for example salt, which formed the basis of my PhD work. I'm interested in the relevance and significance of everyday practices, rituals and engagement with material culture to how places are made and continue to be remade and maintained.

Some of my recent artistic projects have explored textiles as a medium, and as part of collaborative research project Making Suburban Faith I worked with Professor Claire Dwyer and researcher Nazneen Ahmed at UCL to produce a collaborative textile art project, which has been written up in a number of papers and chapters, as well as an artists book (see outputs).

Other current art practice and research focuses on Yiddish political cultures in the Jewish East End from the 1880s to the 1930s. This research which has been funded by the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories was presented in an online exhibition in December 2020 and was the focus of an event in June 2021 with Tim Ingold, Ben Gidley and Rachel Garfield.  

Katrin Bohn teaches and researches sustainable architecture and urban design with a focus on urban food production. Much of her design research deals with the relationships between urban space and food-productive urban landscape and bridges the gaps between environmental design thinking, urban space production and sustainable lifestyles.

Since the UK's first urban agriculture conference Urban Nature (2001), co-curated by Bohn, she has contributed widely to conferences, publications, exhibitions and design and policy debates, both nationally and abroad. As an internationally recognised urban agriculture expert, she has also been advising on national and international research, policy documents and pioneer projects. Her work has been quoted by the UN and UNESCO and has influenced urban planning in the UK, as well as worldwide.

I am currently interested in exploring people's embodied and emotional relationships with digital data, devices and platforms in everyday places (e.g. home, work, transport and public spaces). I am focusing on the ways different people have different relationships ‘the digital’, highlighting how power continually manifests in and through digital technologies. I use feminist and queer methodological tools that enable an exploration of these issues.

I am also interested in the relationships between violence, vulnerability and embodiment. I am working on a collaborative project with Man Kind UK about men's unwanted sexual experiences (MUSE), exploring the barriers men face when trying to access formal support. 

My research experience is tied together through geographies of gender, sexuality and the body. At Oxford, I conducted research on the precarious lives of young working-class men, exploring the emotional and embodied experience of austerity. My PhD focused on men who use Grindr. I was interested in the ways masculinity, sexuality and desire emerge as queer men learned to use digital technologies for sex, dates and intimacy. As a research assistant at Newcastle University, I worked with LGBTQ+ people at a higher education institute to examine experiences of diversity and inclusion. In collaboration with Barnardo’s, I also worked with year 5 school children in North East England to explore – and challenge – their understandings of masculinity and what it means to be a man.

My research involves sociological, cultural and geographical analyses of race, ethnicity and popular culture. It is linked fundamentally by its central theme of qualitative observational research on ethnicities as lived in public cultures/spaces, and comprises explorations and critiques of the spatial dimensions of racialised inequality and resistance. My work emphasises notions of theoretical innovation, empirical originality and sociological intervention.

My research interests can be divided into four main areas:

 - Theorising race and racism in football, with particular focus on connecting ideas around Empire, de/coloniality, racialised identities and anti-racist resistance

- Black British leisure, musical and sonic cultures and spaces

- The experiences of British Asians in sport and leisure

- Social, cultural and geographical aspects of the contemporary English seaside and coast, especially the connections between race, whiteness, im/migration and ‘new’ spaces of multiculture

I have written / (co-)edited eight books: British Asians and Football: Culture, Identity, Exclusion (Routledge, 2007); Race, Ethnicity and Football: Persisting Debates and Emergent Issues (Routledge, 2011); Coastal Cultures: Liminality and Leisure (Leisure Studies Association, 2014); Sport and South Asian Diasporas: Playing Through Time and Space (Routledge, 2014); Race, Place and the Seaside: Postcards from the Edge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Transforming Sport: Knowledges, Practices and Structures (Routledge, 2018); Racism and English Football: For Club and Country (Routledge, 2021); and Leisure, Racism, and National Populist Politics (Routledge, 2021).

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 research interests focus around understanding the fundamental question of what it means to be human. I am interested in knowing whether certain abilities that we all take for granted such as language, symbolism, and abstract thought are unique to our species (Homo sapiens) or were present in other ancient human species such as Homo heidelbergensis or the Neanderthals. In order to ascertain this I look at a range of evidence strands but I primarily focus on the stone tools left behind by our ancestors for clues to their mental capabilities. I am also interested in what cognitive, behavioural and social thresholds are needed by hominins in order to allow them to successfully disperse across the globe and overcome any environmental constraints. Finally, I am fascinated by how ancient hominins treated their dead, particularly how and why some of them seem to have practiced cannibalism. By understanding the treatment of the dead, we can gain greater insights to the lifeways and social structures of the living.

In order to try and understand our hominin ancestors I am involved with a number of archaeological projects here in the UK and in East Africa. My main research project is the Isimila Stone Age Project where I am the Director of a multi-institutional and international research collaboration between academic institutions in the UK and Tanzania.

Andrew is interested in how spatial planning can help to deliver climate change adaptation and mitigation, manage coastal change and flooding, encourage integrated water management and regulate short term rentals such as AirBnB.

Through his private practice,  has contributed to government, government agency and research organisation projects on

- delivering integrated water management through planning

- flooding, including multiple objective SuDS and best practice in Strategic Flood Risk Assessments.

He has published articles and blogs in town planning journals and websites on flooding and coastal change in England and Portugal.

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).

Professor Julie Doyle researches in media and communication and is an authority on climate communication. Her research examines the ways in which media and culture shape our understandings of, and responses to, climate change.

With a particular focus upon visual communication, Prof. Doyle has worked collaboratively with visual artists and cultural educators, and provided consultancy for environmental NGOs, government and the sustainability communications sector on best practice for climate and environmental communication.

Professor Doyle is committed to examining the role of media and communication in understanding and addressing climate change, and in working collaboratively to find ways to create more sustainable societies. She is Co-Director of the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics, is Co-Chair of MeCCSA’s Climate Change Network and was a member of the founding Board of Directors of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA).

Watch Professor Doyle's inaugural lecture, 'Communicating Climate Change in an Age of (Un)Certainty' (May 2017).

See Professor Doyle's research impact through her contributions to a REF2021 impact case study on Mobilising Visual Communication for Socio-Political Change

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

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

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

2.     Human Rights and the Politics of Resistance

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

 3.     Decolonial  Ethics

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

 4. Law, Ethics and Democracy

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

Additional Roles: 

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

My research career to date has focused on the development of innovative low-cost tools that tackle pressing global disease problems. In Malawi, I worked on a UNICEF-funded project 'Assessment of Drinking Water Quality for Low-Cost Water Technology Options in Rural Areas' which led to the re-design and improved management of rural wells, providing low-income communities with safer drinking water. More recently, I was involved in a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded project in India 'SaniPath Typhoid' which sought to enhance understanding of typhoid transmission pathways in Kolkata’s megaslums.

In Europe, new methods developed during an EU Interreg-funded project 'RISKMANCHE' have helped identify human faecal contamination of rivers and established viral removal rates in a full-scale wastewater reuse systems (Thames Water). This information is helping water companies and environmental agencies to meet international standards and more effectively protect public health, by detecting, or interrupting the transmission routes of human waterborne diseases.

I undertake research in the broad field of political ecology. My work is informed by intersectional feminist theory, critical development studies and environmental advocacy-activism around resource extraction, with an empirical focus on the gendered ecological politics of displacement, resettlement and dispossession in forest and flood contexts in Indonesia and Thailand. Current projects include work on the ways that gendered processes of mobility and migrant remittances unsettle linear analyses of dispossession associated with oil palm investment. I am also exploring ways to rethink feminist political ecology through engagement with anti-colonial environmental activisms in Southeast Asia and the practice of feminist political ecology pedagogy and research in diverse activist and professional contexts.

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.

I am a social and health psychologist with interests in health and well-being and how identity processes are related to these. My research focuses, firstly, on health behaviour change and, secondly, on reducing inequality in educational settings through interventions known to reduce stereotype threat.

My research interests include:

• Applying self-affirmation theory as an intervention in health
• Narrative health information
• Identity-related process in understanding stereotype threat
• Applying self-affirmation theory to buffer against stereotype threat
• Community-led research
• Health and educational inequality

My interests broadly relate to social and sustainable design - this includes design, craft and nature, regenerative and restorative design and making practices and circular economies. I have researched practice-based technology and making methods for participatory community planning and making in support of health and well-being.    

Designed products, spaces, services and systems pervade every part of our lives. The world is awash with ‘stuff’  - Design has ‘made it’. However in times of ecological crisis, environmental pollution, biodiversity collapse, social and political uncertainty and economic disparity design stands simultaneously as both disease and cure. 

I am interested in how designing and making contributes to positive, public persuasion, culture shift and design for change beyond delivering the next iteration of homogenous mobile phone. Design, craft and making have agency and are being engaged as tools and means to address issues of our time. Moreover design is about engagement – through potent, product propaganda, meaningful, material messaging and critical, craft campaigns, designers and makers are utilising the powerful language of materials, objects and products and the ubiquity of services and systems to change behaviour, provoke protest and empower people.

Creatives of diverse types are dispensing with disciplinary traditions and forming new alliances, helping rewild and regenerate habitats, promoting clean growth, creating tools for community activism and empowering more virtuous circular economies. Post disciplinary and inter-sectional methods see the rethinking of material manipulation, techno-crafting, distributed manufacturing and open-sourcing broadening inclusion and inviting more democratic pathways for creative change. Some of our most pressing issues have re-awakened design with the critical concern and purpose that once defined it and artists, designers and makers can turn these issues into opportunities for positive intervention and more ethical and sustainable development that integrates more symbiotically with our eco-system.

My research interests lie in seeking to bridge the disjuncture between climate change science, water resources management practice and local articulations and experiences of changing water environments. My work is critically engaged with understanding how developed economies organize and manage their freshwater resources with regards to transitioning towards sustainable futures in the context of climate change. At heart my research explores why climate change narratives are still failing to resonate with most citizens, and are still not embedded within organisational praxis, and seeks to determine what approaches may close these gaps in order to support transitions towards sustainable futures. Inherent to this line of questioning are explorations of emergent forms of citizenship, discourses of governance and the links between landscape, taskscape and community within the late capitalist era. I draw on the work of Karen Bakker, Noel Castree, Eric Swyngedouw, Neil Adger and Tim Ingold to undertake empirical qualitative fieldwork which interrogates the political, cultural and physical intersections which co-create our sense of place, and our intimate, immediate relationship with our water environments. Recent research projects have included 'Rewilding elders: understanding environmental activism during retirement'; 'WetlandLIFE: taking the bite out of wetlands'; 'Towards Hydrocitizenship' and 'Community water governance: understanding place and subjectivity'.

My research interests cover the geographies of sport and leisure. My doctoral research explored British cultures of adventure and the heroic masculinities associated with mountaineering. My more recent work is interested in the use, governance and regulation of public space for leisure and recreation, addressing issues such as access, property rights, citizenship and self-governance. Theoretically, my work cuts across human geography, sociology, politics, cultural studies, social history, sport studies and leisure theory. I employ a variety of theoretical tools to understand the spatial aspects of sport and leisure cultures - the spatial theories of Mikhail Bakhtin; Victor Turner's writings on liminality; gift theory; theories of affect; and, post-subcultural theories - and have contributed to the application of these approaches to empirical research in sport and leisure studies.

My current research interests include the social regulation of leisure in public space; countercultural sport; connecting people and communities through food and farming; and, the cultural heritage of waterscapes.

Methodologically, I specialise in qualitative and collaborative empirical methods and with Professor Neil Ravenscroft (University of Brighton) and Dr Niamh Moore (Edinburgh University) have developed the concept of ‘collaborative story spirals’ to describe a method of contextualised and situated biographical and narrative research; an approach that has been utilised in European heritage projects.

My research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, European Union (Interreg Programme), and Political Studies Association.

In my role as a lecturer in Events Studies, I understand myself as a facilitator of knowledge in as well as beyond the classroom setting. My teaching is very informed by the principles of the flipped classroom and aspires to enable students to think outside the box and therefore critically about their subject of study. Hereby, this facilitator’s role is guided by the following key approaches:

• Research-informed teaching: As a university lecturer, I am teaching as well as researching in the subject area of Event Studies. Therefore, my teaching contents are very much informed by my past and current research projects. The case studies, analytical perspectives as well as study materials often derive from my continuous engagements with my research field. Simultaneously, I also let my teaching influence my research. Therefore, classroom-based debates as well as students’ critical inquiries strongly impact my research trajectory.
• Game-based learning: The role of facilitation requires me to think about the best ways to communicate taught contents. One of my preferred strategies, hereby, is the usage of role plays, gaming principles and digital methods in my teaching approach. Game-based learning allows me to construct a learning environment, which allows experimentation and risk taking as well as empathy and emotional understanding. Games construct narratives, which allow to grasp abstractions in a more accessible way.
• Creative didactical resources: The handling of complexities in the field of event studies influences as well my final approach to teaching. Hereby, my interest lies on the usage of creative tools as pedagogical approach. On selected occasions, I employ techniques of creative writing, crafting and drawing in order to lighten the mood but as well deepen the understanding of the thematic enquiries.  

My current research focuses on the development of inclusivity, well-being and race equity within Higher Education pedagogies. These interests have developed out of my work within Educational Studies (specifically Higher Education) and Dance Studies (specifically Popular Dance Studies) in my past roles. This is directly supported by my work as Lead for the Inclusive Practice Partnerships Scheme and Institutional Lead for Inclusive Practice.  

Professor Jaspal's research cuts across the fields of psychology and public health, focussing particularly on social psychological approaches to promoting good psychological and physical health outcomes. He has developed the Health Adversity Risk Model (HARM) to predict the impact of social and psychological stressors and identity threat on health outcomes. Much of his research using the model has focused on HIV prevention, HIV care and mental health. With Professor Dame Glynis Breakwell, Rusi Jaspal has contributed to the development of Identity Process Theory. Additionally, Professor Jaspal has conducted extensive research into aspects of psychological wellbeing among gay men, the management of identities in conflict, national identity, prejudice and discrimination, public understanding of science, technology and medicine and the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rusi Jaspal is the author or editor of 6 books, and has written over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and several reports for the Department of Health. He supervises and examines PhD students in his areas of expertise.

Olu Jenzen is Reader in Media Studies and the Director of the Research Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender. Her research focuses on Digital Culture and Activism, and LGBTQ+ Media Cultures, in particular global visual activism and LGBTQ+ social media youth cultures. She is the co-editor of The Aesthetics of Protest: Global Visual Culture and Communication (AUP, 2020) and a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, on 'Global Queer and Feminist Visual Activism’ (2022). She has published in journals such as Convergence; Gender, Place and Culture and Social Movement Studies. Advocating socially engaged, human-centred research across both digital media research and gender and sexuality research, her work with young people is participatory and embedded in community environments. She currently leads two projects, a pilot study on LGBTQ+ Digital Youth Work and the Gender Creativity and Community project, researching the impact of community belonging on gender-diverse young people’s wellbeing.

Adam is a Principal Lecturer of Strategy and Marketing within the School of Business and Law at the University of Brighton.  Adam recently was awarded his PhD from the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton. How are carbon-light holidays possible? a social practice analysis of no-flight holidays. He has a wealth of commercial knowledge gained from working at a senior strategic level in a FTSE 250 company. He started his career in the travel industry working as a tour guide rising to the position as Head of Marketing. It was during his time as Head of Marketing, Research and Product Development that he developed an expert understanding of the issues around strategic direction and the challenges applying the principles of strategic marketing to an extremely competitive and challenging commercial environment. Adam's work included developing the company's strategy for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and setting industry wide reporting standards on CSR issues with the United Nations Environmental Program's.

Since joining the University Adam has led the validation of the two new Sport Business Management courses, has taken a lead role as the academic responsible for graduate employability, enterprise and innovation and is the Academic Subject Group Lead for Responsible Enterprise and Innovation. Adam has also been central to several consultancy projects related to tourism development. In addition to his academic studies his personal research interests focus primarily on leisure mobility, consumer behaviour change in connection with the environmental crisis facing the planet. He has also developed an innovative method of diary data collection, the email-diary.

Claudia Kappenberg’s research focuses on moving image, live and interdisciplinary performance practices, choreographic approaches and screendance, as well as the historical and theoretical narratives which underpin these practices. She is concerned with the integration of choreographic and cinematographic practices, with visual literacy, performance philosophy and concepts of body-mind integration. This work is framed by a wider interest in questions of representation, feminist discussions and contemporary debates on neoliberalist politics and their impact on the artist and artistic production.

PhD application for research in related fields are welcome. For further information see TECHNE.

In her visual and performance practice Claudia Kappenberg draws on a background of dance and visual arts to create minimal choreographies which examine patterns of the everyday. The work is often developed for particular sites or reconfigured in their relocation to other sites and exhibited in the form of live interventions, gallery based performances or screen-based installations. The work has been shown in Europe, the United States and the Middle East.

Claudia Kappenberg is a founder-editor of the International Journal of Screendance and peer-reviews for a number of journals, as well as for research councils such as the British AHRC and the Canadian SSHRC. She undertakes consultancy for Screendance initiatives, juries on related film selection panels, and is regularly invited to speak at Screendance festivals such as in Buenos Aires, Limerick, Bordeaux, Brussels, Wuppertal, Basel, Bucharest, Freiburg. She has been guest lecturer at the École des Beaux Arts de Grenoble (France), Akademie der Künste (Munich, Germany) and Hazira Performing Arts (Jerusalem, Israel), and is currently a guest on the board of the École Supérieure d'Arts de Clermont Métropole (France.)

Claudia Kappenberg trained in Modern Dance, Butoh and Movement Analysis and danced professionally in Europe and New Zealand before coming to London in 1991.  She completed an MA Fine Art/Film and Video at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 1998 and taught at Central Saint Martins and London Guildhall University until 2002. She worked freelance as videographer for Tate Modern, Tate Britain and independent arts organisations, and started lecturing at The University of Brighton in 2004.

Dr. Catherine Kelly is a geographer with research interests in sustainability, tourism and wellbeing. Her lecturing, research and practices cross a range of these broad categories. Catherine's research areas have varied over her academic career - starting with rural geography, then moving into the field of heritage studies and then tourism (cultural, heritage, wellness and sustainable tourism specifically); with a more recent emphasis on the importance of 'blue spaces' for human wellbeing. She is interested in the importance of water-based 'therapeutic landscapes' for physical, psychological and social wellbeing. Catherine's research also looks at how wellbeing can be used to advocate for personal relationships with the coast and its stewardship/environmental conservation. She is interested in access to the sea - in physical, social and cultural terms. Since joining the School of Business and Law, Catherine is also interested in the role of the Blue Economy in tourism development and sustainable business practices.

Catherine's work on Blue Spaces has received widespread media attention resulting in interviews for the BBC, Guardian newspaper, Independent, and a range of high circulation magazines and podcasts. She is a regular invited speaker at public events and festivals in the UK and overseas. She sits on the newly created UK national Blue Space Forum for the Environment Agency.

My direct Research Expertise relates to: 

• the practice and application of drawing, painting, sculpture and artists' moving image in western and South Asian art contexts
• environmental art; projects related to European and (South) Asian moving image, experimental film and it contextual study
• South Asian contemporary art and art criticism
• questions around the spectatorial in artworks' public reception
• transnational and transcultural perspectives in the arts 

I am interested in media theory and post-1850s literary history and theory (especially Virginia Woolf, Anglo-American and European modernisms), with a focus on politics, feminism, and the philosophy of media (media ethics, digital ontology, loss, mourning). I am also interested in the intellectual and socio-cultural reception of Ancient Greek texts (mainly philosophy and drama). 

My research focus is the formation of classed identities. I am interested in the everyday experiences of people who live on council estates and the material and social conditions which produce and legitimate knowledges of these people and this place. My research explores the connections between place and identity through an analysis of the material and social production of the estate as a classed position. I am interested in the role of affect in the formation and reformation of classed selves. Specifically, developing Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of the habitus to explore the visceral sensation through which the body is disciplined in moments of difference.

Yunah Lee's research interests are design history, visual and material culture in Korea and East Asia, transnational and cross-cultural studies of modernity and modernism, representations of national and personal identities, and political agencies of art, craft, design and fashion.  

East Asian Modern Design

Yunah’s recent research focus is on the development of East Asian design and design history since 1945. As a co-steering member of two AHRC Network Scheme projects, ‘Translating and writing Modern Design Histories in East Asia’ (2012-14) and ‘Fashion and Translation: Britain, Japan China and Korea’ (2014-15), Yunah has taken her research in the areas of Korean graphic design and fashion, investigating how modernity in Korean design emerged from the interactions with Euro-America, while being characterised by inter-regional interventions within East Asia, and how Korean designers and critics engaged with global innovation and creativity during the course. She is interested in building connections and networks with academics and practitioners working in the area of Korean design as well as Asian design. 

British Modern Design and National Identity

Yunah’s doctoral research, titled ‘Selling Modern British Design: Overseas Design Exhibitions by the Council of Industrial Design 1949-1971’ focused on the series of overseas design exhibitions organised or participated in by the Council of Industrial Design between 1949 and 1971. Through the reconstruction of these exhibitions, the research positioned the CoID’s exhibitions in the context of British government exhibition policy and national publicity and reviewed the notion of good design and commerciality in the period of 1950s and 1960s. Through careful inter-reading of texts and images, Yunah analysed and reconstructed the contents and styles of exhibitions and re-evaluated the principles and style of good modern British design promoted by the CoID. Yunah’s study revealed that a constant tension existed between traditional images and heritage, dominant and popular representation of Britishness, and the contemporary and modern aspects of Britain idealized by the CoID in its own design exhibition, therefore, contributed to debates about the diverse aspects of British identity and its representation through design exhibitions. 

Retail design: department store

Yunah’s research titled ‘Design for Profit: Barkers, Derry and Toms and Pontings during the Interwar Period’ dealt with the role of design in retail business. Through looking at changes in architecture and displays of three department stores in London during 1920s and 1930s, the study pondered upon the slogan of ‘design as a marketing tool’ and how identity and modernity was represented and perceived in various visual tools in retail design. The application of the Art Deco style to exterior and interior space and the new marketing campaigns, especially the use of posters, was interpreted in the theoretical frame of modernity and Modernism in British architecture and design during the interwar period.

Elisa's interests lie in researching on the fields of Design/Architecture/Urbanism, addressing space and inhabitation at different scales.

Her research focuses on developing critical understandings and approaches for the design of spaces, in particular by questioning what an interior space is and which roles it covers in the ever-changing spatial landscape we live in.

Elisa has carried out research on the field of Interior (architecture and design), and its critical engagement with related fields of knowledge, for the understanding and design of contemporary urban scenarios, focusing in particular on the roles and values of the in-between urban spaces (interstitial, accidental, left-over spaces).

Dr. Vasileios (Vas) Leontitsis is a lecturer in Globalisation Studies at the University of Brighton. He has previously worked at the University of Sheffield and the London School of Economics (LSE). He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Sheffield (2010), an MA in International Political Economy from Warwick University (2001), and a BA in International and European Economic Studies from the Athens University of Economics and Business (2000). His predominant research interests lie in the spheres of post-development, environmental politics,  EU and Greek politics and migration studies. He has published on decentralisation in Greece, the EU environmental policy and the process of Europeanisation. 

Within the broad context of space, place and culture I am fascinated by the embodied and performative dynamics of human experience and behaviour.  Underpinned by a longstanding interest and intellectual engagement with the ‘architecture’ of space, my focus encompasses the material, virtual and simulated spaces associated with everyday life. For example, the sea and the coast, cruise ships, popular film, photography, art, tourism and leisure.  I am interested in how people engage with, imagine and adapt to such landscapes and spaces.  

My continuing interest in cruise ships as bounded and transient spaces for work and leisure, framed by maritime heritage (film, dress, rituals of the sea, architecture), dates back to my past experience of living and working at sea. The intellectual and practical experience of cruise ships directly influenced my PhD research exploring the constructed discourses of cruise travel through an analysis of popular film (Ship of Fools, Carry on Cruising, Titanic).   In so doing it acknowledged the multisensory nature of film and how the liminal realm of film space is experienced in and through the imagination, memory and emotion.

My interests in maritime heritage and histories of the sea / coastal cultures also encompasses how the visual and material world create new narratives of meaning that help to shape individual and collective identities alongside particular experiences and encounters with the ocean and liminal environments where land and water meet. I continue to be interested in the power of discourse generally, and specifically the critical discourse highlighting the consequential socio-cultural impacts of cruise ships and their associated activities on coastal regions and destinations.

Core areas of activity, including the areas for PhD supervision are:

The visual and visuality

Embodiment and the senses

Architecture and materiality

The coast / sea / seascapes

Heritage / Maritime heritage

Cruise ships and cruise liners

My research addresses the implicit background to political and ethical practices. In my current research, I attend to the ontological assumptions in political analyses and imaginaries:

Racism, coloniality and ontology

This research interrogates the turn towards the philosophical concept of ‘ontology’ in attempts to understand relations among nature, materiality, technology, agency, change, difference, and the human. I am especially interested in how contemporary theorisations of racism, migration, borders, and sovereign power often draw – directly or indirectly – upon the concept of ontology. I draw upon decolonial critiques of the history of the concept of ontology, examining the relationships between its emergence and the development of colonial and racist cosmologies. This research explores the legacies of these relationships for contemporary theorising.

In my previous research, the kinds of implicit backgrounds I focused on were historically- and geographically-specific modes of embodiment and affect:

The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, Sexuality, and Gender in Everyday Practice

I have developed innovative theorisations of the affective, bodily and ‘machinic’ background to the micro-politics of everyday life. This research builds on my doctoral study to examine how racialised, ethnicised, sexualised and gendered power relations are enacted and embodied in everyday practice. Theoretically, it is informed by Deleuzoguattarian theories of ‘affect’ and ‘machinism’ to explore new ways of thinking about the relationship between the capabilities bodies have to affect and be affected by one another in specific events and broader historically-specific social and political formations.

Sexual Politics in the SlutWalk

Based on empirical work conducted at SlutWalk marches in 2011 and 2012, this project – a collaboration with Alexandra Fanghanel (University of Greenwich) – considered how anti-rape discourses variously contest, negotiate and reproduce dominant constructions of female sexual subjectivity and embodiment and of gendered inequalities in access to urban public space.

My research interests are: Corporate governance, Environmental Sustainability, Cultural studies, Paradox theory, Institutional theory, Inclusive Marketing

My research interests lie primarily in the field of labour economics, socio-economic development and applied econometrics, with a particular emphasis on the economic and social aspects of labour migration. My research focuses on three areas: 1. undocumented labour migration; 2. precarious and atypical forms of employment; 3. migration and regional development. I am interested in both applied and theoretical research in these areas and has conducted a range of research consultancies for the Development Centre of OECD, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for International Migration (IOM) and national bodies.

In November 2019, my project proposal on 'the impact of migrant remittances on promoting small and medium-sized enterprises in home countries' was approved for funding of a PhD studentship by the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership:https://www.brighton.ac.uk/research-and-enterprise/postgraduate-research-degrees/funding-opportunities-and-studentships/2020-scdtp-migrant-remittances.aspx

In October 2017, I completed a project, concerning atypical and precarious forms of employment in Greece, in support of the impact assessment on the review of the Written Statement Directive (Directive 91/533/ECC), commissioned by PPMI - Public Policy and Management Institute, Vilnius, Lithuania. The study is available at: http://bit.ly/WSD-PPMI

I sit on the coordinating committee for Bulgaria in the longitudinal SHARE study - Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (http://issk-bas.org/share-survey-wave-7/).

My research interests revolve around three main areas:

1. LGBTQ equality issues and policies from a geographic perspective (locally, nationally, and transnationally);
2. The spaces made and used by LGBTQ communities such as neighbourhoods, bars, and social groups;
3. Issues of body image, shape and size amongst GBQ men, especially in the Bear subculture.

Most of my research has been done in partnership with LGBTQ community groups, charities, and activists from around the world. Through my teaching and research, I want to show and explore how we can use geography to improve LGBTQ lives.

My current research interests fall into two areas: 1. Understanding the properties of duricrusts and applying this knowledge in archaeological contexts; (2) Unravelling climate histories in southern Africa through the analysis of documentary evidence.

Duricrusts in landscape and archaeological contexts

My primary area of research concerns the development and environmental significance of silcrete duricrusts. The primary goals of this research are to (a) characterise the micromorphology and geochemistry of duricrusts developed in different landscape settings, (b) assess the extent to which duricrusts may be used as indicators of past environments, and (c) apply this fundamental knowledge for use in archaeological contexts. To date, my research has focused mainly upon non-pedogenic silcretes in the Kalahari Desert, central Australia, and the UK, with archaeology-related work in southern Africa and the Stonehenge landscape (UK). I am currently working on British Academy and Leverhulme Trust funded research using silcrete as an archaeological provenancing tool at Stonehenge and in the Makgadikgadi Basin, Botswana.

Reconstructing historical climatic change using documentary sources

My second research focus is the reconstruction of past climate variability through analyses of historical documents, particularly missionary and other colonial sources. Working with collaborators in Europe and southern Africa, I have developed novel methodologies to establish chronologies of hydroclimatic variability in the Kalahari Desert, Lesotho, KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), Madagascar and western India using these materials. I am currently working on British Academy funded research using documentary evidence to reconstruct a 19th century climate history of Mozambique.

Darren Newbury’s principal research interests lie in the relationship between photography, history, politics and cultural memory, with a particular concentration on Africa, and South Africa specifically. Significant publications include: Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (2009), a major monograph on photography during the apartheid period and its place in post-apartheid memorialisation; People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited (2013), a photobook based on the recently rediscovered collection of photographer Bryan Heseltine; and The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (2015), co-edited with Christopher Morton, a volume exploring new methodological approaches to researching and curating the photographic archive, in addition to its specifically African concerns. He has also recently co-edited a Special Issue of Visual Studies on ‘Photography and African Futures’ (2018) with Richard Vokes, which through a series of case studies examines how and why, from early colonial times onwards, states, institutions, political parties, civil society organizations and individual citizens used photography as a means for representing various kinds of imagined futures. In addition to academic publications, he has curated exhibitions at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011-12) and District Six Museum, Cape Town (2013-14), based on his photographic research.

He has also researched and published on the history of British documentary photography, photographic education and community photography practices. He has a long-standing interest in visual research methods and was editor of the international journal Visual Studies from 2003 to 2015.

He has recently edited a volume on Women and Photography in Africa, with Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas; and is working on a major study of the role of photography in US public diplomacy in Africa during the period of the Cold War and African decolonisation.

In 2020, he received the Royal Anthropological Institute Photography Committee Award for his distinguished contribution to the study of photography and anthropology.

Marina is an internationally renowned policy, planning and sustainable development expert and Professor of Tourism and International Development at Brighton School of Business and Law, which is an Affiliate Member of the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO).  

She is a geographer with a background in economics, considerable experience of high-quality research, consultancy, PhD supervision, teaching and curriculum development and a keen interest in interdisciplinary research.  

Between 2017 and 2021, she plaid a key strategic role as Academic Lead for the University of Brighton's Responsible Futures Agenda, an initiative aimed at fostering innovation through impactful interdisciplinary research and consultancy collaborations, at local, national and international level. This laid the ground of the current Global Challenges Agenda.  

Marina has advised on numerous international cooperation and research assignments funded by International Development Organisations (IDOs) including The World Bank, the European Union, The UN (UNESCO, UNIDO, UNWTO), the Commonwealth Secretariat, the millennium Challenge Corporation as well as National Ministries, Tourism Boards, Regional Development Agencies and NGOs. Such work has provided the basis of very impactful work (see: REF2014 and REF2021 Impact Case Studies). Examples of other projects undertaken by her are available here.   

Amongst her most recent achievements are:  

- 2023: Selected Member of The World Economic Forum Global Future Council for Sustainable Development;

- 2022: Elected Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism;  

- 2021: Appointed Alternate Member of the UNWTO World Committee on Tourism Ethics (2021-2025); and  

- 2018 to 2021: served as UK national Research Exercise Framework (REF2021) panelist for UOA C24: Sport, Tourism and Leisure.  

She is known globally for her excellence in leading and collaborating with multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder and multi-cultural teams and for her commitment to generating new knowledge on ways in which tourism can play a key role in sustainable development by stimulating local economies, conserving the environment, developing peoples and changing lives.  

Her research spans across 3 main areas, including:   

- Sustainable Tourism Development for Resilient Communities - i.e., the complexity of tourism development in the Global South; niche (tourism) product development; the impact of heath crisis on tourism communities (Ebola, COVID); healthy lifestyle tourism clusters; Local, National and IDOs' interventions for resilient communities; travel philanthropy.  

- Innovation, responsible entrepreneurship and sustainability in tourism - i.e. British Council project on Innovationa for African Universities;  circular economy, contemporary arts and community development, contemporary arts for sustainable development in Africa.  

- Policy, Planning and Governance - i.e., master-planning; training needs analysis and capacity building; responsible leadership; participatory and community centered development. 

My research examines the ways humans relate to the environment, and the universe more generally, and the ways in which these relationships are challenged by social movements.

My work on the sociology of outer space covers historical cosmologies, contemporary space technologies and science fiction. I am particularly interested at the moment in the way in which outer space is being conceived as an ‘environment’ and what that means for our future interaction with it. This includes issues around the use of space resources, orbital debris, and the protection of wilderness sites. In 2007 I co-authored the first overview text on the sociology of outer space, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe, with Peter Dickens. In 2016 we edited the Palgrave International Handbook of Society, Culture and Outer Space. I have recently completed a chapter on outer space for the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology.

My work on social movements draws on psychoanalytic theory, and argues for the centrality of fantasy to activism, culminating in my 2014 book, Fantasy and Social Movements. I have published illustrative case studies of the pro-space movement, the outer space protection movement and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

I have also recently edited a book, Changing our Environment, Changing Ourselves: Nature, Labour, Knowledge and Alienation, which examines themes emerging from the environmental sociology of Peter Dickens. I am currently working with my colleague Matthew Adams on human-animal relations, and more specifically urban shepherding programmes.

My research interests broadly concern issues of inclusivity in the history of art, art museums and art collections, as well as a subject specialization in nineteenth century visual culture with a focus on portraiture. My primary concerns are how gender and related social formations (sexuality, the nation, the modern) organize the production and circulation of visual images. I have applied feminist methods to research on the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries including through a number of collaborations with artists, curators and cultural organizations.

Rajapillai’s research interest is in the area of cross-cultural collaboration/communication and migration and identity. She is interested in investigating the role of culture in the uptake and use of online communication technology for cross-cultural collaboration/communication. Her research interest includes Web 2 technology for learning and teaching.

She is also interested issues surrounding identity construction of migrants. 

Xavier Ribas' work explores notions of practice and experience of space, the relationship between centre and periphery, the built and the unbuilt environment, and the contemporary fragmentation of landscape. In a wider context his research considers the relationship of man and territory, engaging with the notion of the production of space (ref: Lefebvre), the practice of space and the everyday (ref: de Certeau) and the notion of anthropological place (Ref: Augé). 

Ribas' documentary photographic practice embraces cross-disciplinary approaches to research. Trained as an anthropologist interested in geography (ref: Davis, Harvey), microhistory and the philosophy of history (ref: Bloch, Benjamin), his work is also informed by former professional experience in the fields of urban planning and architecture. His large photographic grids, often including text, archive materials and moving image, investigate histories and geographies of abandonment, contested sites and objects, temporary settlements, spaces of urban corporate development and exclusion, border territories, and geographies of extraction.

Xavier Ribas, along with Louise Purbrick, is Principal Investigator of the AHRC funded research project Traces of Nitrate: Mining History and Photography Between Britain and Chile, developed at the University of Brighton in collaboration with Chilean photographer Ignacio Acosta, who completed a PhD in 2016 as part of the project. The research investigates the histories and legacies of British investment in Chilean nitrate and copper mines and involvement in global trafficking. Through an examination of sites, artifacts and images, the project traces nitrate and copper’s route from natural mineral state processed in the Atacama Desert and the Andean mountain range through transported commodities and stock market exchange value to become, ultimately, part of the material and symbolic inheritance of London mansions and estates in the capital’s surrounding countryside. It undertakes new photographic documentation of geographically disparate but historically connected landscapes, remote sites of extraction and metropolitan financial districts, accompanied by an analysis of these commodities' material and visual culture.

Traces of Nitrate has received three AHRC awards:

2012-16 https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FI021671%2F1

2017-18 https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FR001391%2F1 

2021-24 https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FV00915X%2F1

Traces of Nitrate has also attracted external funding from partners in Spain, UK and Chile. A comprehensive website of the research and public outcomes to date exists here: www.tracesofnitrate.org

Xavier Ribas studied BA Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain (1990) and Documentary Photography at the Newport School of Art and Design (1993). He has been involved in many international exhibitions including the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Stedelijk Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Bluecoat Liverpool, Le Bal, Aperture Gallery, George Eastman House, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporáneo and the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo.

His work is represented in major public and private collections including the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Stedelijk Museum, Fonds Nacional d'Art Contemporain, Museo Universidad de Navarra, Fotocollectie Universiteit Leiden, Fondazione MAST, Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo.

He has received awards, commissions and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2012-16, 2017-18, 2021-24), the International Photography Research Network (2006), Commande Publique du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication/Centre National des Arts Plastiques (2006), and Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail (2007-2008), among others.

Ribas has also collaborated on research, exhibition and publication projects with the Universidad de Salamanca (1998, 2000, 2009), Universitat Politècnica de València (2008), Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail (2007-2008), Universiteit Leiden (2006), UNIACC Santiago (2010), and Universidad de Navarra (2009, 2014-2015).

My research interests are focused on extended reality (XR), through immersive room-based, screen-based, or city-wide mobile media. My work is designed to tell stories about imagined, forgotten, or unremembered others. 

I have a transdisciplinary practice which investigates and combines areas of British colonial history, archival data, computer science, digital geographies, and digital humanities.  The focus of the work is on the interplay between spatial memory and physical space in the built environment as an intersectional backdrop to examine contemporary, retro, and historical stories.

Methodologies I use in my practice intersect across practical and theoretical frames such as computer vision, human-to-computer interaction, human-to-human looking, and by extension machines that see.

These methods are highly experimental using media which consists in combination of;

• Photographs
• Moving Image
• Augmented reality
• Virtual reality 
• Data
• Conversational chatbots
• Frontend programming (HTML CSS JavaScript React)

My research interests relate to applied microeconomics, particularly issues of labour economics, education, migration, subjective well-being,  and development.

Over the past years I have been particularly interested in wage inequality, and the role of education, compositional changes of the labour force and migration. I have investigated such issues for the UK, U.S. and Italy. Morever, my research on immigration has been based on Spanish administrative data.

As an expert of migration, I have been contributing to the Migration Observatory at the Univesity of Oxford since 2010. 

In more recent years, I have conducted research to assess the determinants of successful school-to-work transition of young men and women in Africa. 

My research has also paid attention to subjective well being, specifically for job satisfaction and mental health. I have recently worked on a paper analysing the effect of repeated lockdowns of Covid-19 on mental health of people in the UK. 

I am currently developing a research project to assess the role of exposure to crime/conflict for school-to-work transitions of young women (and men) in developing countries. 

I’m an economic sociologist excited by the impact of technology on society, education and business. My joint research project into the Fully Functioning University was awarded Researchers of the Year 2017 by Professor Mark Cowling, Brighton Business School Head of research. The findings have been published by Emerald as part of their Great Debates in Higher Education series.

I research the history and role of higher education, graduate employability and how graduates might best be served by university. I am interested by the role social media, big data and internet technologies in how society works and how business is conducted.

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.

Crossing the divide between the natural and the social sciences, my main research interests focus on the impact of tropospheric air pollution: 

Air quality science 

Air pollution is responsible for an estimated 310,000 premature deaths per year in Europe alone (WHO 2015), with associated societal, economic and environmental costs. My research uses cutting edge monitoring equipment to explore what is in the air that we breathe, and thus what we can do to reduce air pollution and improve health.  In particular, my research examines the reactive trace species of atmospheric pollutants, including 'ultrafine particles' (UFP), for which there is emerging evidence regarding their hazardous nature to human health. 

Perceptions of Air Quality 

In order to reduce local air pollution, it is important to understand how people perceive air pollution, and how to disentangle it in people’s minds from climate change.  Air pollution disproportionately affects the elderly, the young and those with pre-existing cardio-respiratory conditions.  My research examines the most effective ways to communicate information on air pollution, how this information is perceived, and what makes people listen. 

Recognised as an artist working primarily in drawing and print, Emma Stibbon’s practice investigates the histories and geological narratives of place. She has established her reputation through an international exhibition profile and a series of residencies and awards.

Emma’s research examines both natural processes and the impact of human endeavor on place, recognizing both are related. Drawn to places that put a perspective on the viewer, her practice as an artist is preoccupied with environments that are in a condition of change or flux. Whether this is the seismic forces of geologically changing landscape or retreating glaciers and ice shelves, her subjects are connected by their sense of scale or drama. Emma examines how the apparently monumental can be so fragile as well as how the appearance of a place can retain the structures and patterns of its evolution. Her response often leads to a fluid understanding of geography, culture, politics and memory.

Fundamental to Emma’s research is how drawing can act as a means of communicating our relationship to a changing environment. Through her investigation of location, Emma aims to convey the frailty of both human experience and the graphic ‘touch’ of drawing. The mediation of image through process is a key part of Emma’s enquiry. Her methods for gathering on-site material include direct observational drawing and photography. Walking and orientating in the field is preliminary to her recording observed forms.

Drawing is fundamental to her work, a primary concern for her is the correspondence between ideas, process and place. Through her use of fragile drawing media, process, composition, and scale Emma's work invites the viewer to reflect on our relationship to an inherently fragile and rapidly changing world.  Her approach to drawing opens up new ways of thinking about and reflecting on environment by complicating and enriching our understanding of landscape as a pictorial genre.

She has taken part in several international residencies including the Artist Placement in Antarctica, organised by the Scott Polar Research Institute (2013); the Arctic Circle.org expedition to Svalbard in the High Arctic (2013); Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut (2016); Artist in Residence at Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park (2016); Project Pressure Grand Canyon National Parks Artist in Residence (2017), Death Valley National Park Arts Foundation (2019), and the Queen Sonja/Artica Svalbard Print Award, Svalbard (2019).

Emma has recently exhibited her work at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London; Galerie Bastian, Berlin; Earth Gallery, University of Bristol; Eres Stiftung, Munich; the New Art Gallery, Walsall;  the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne; The Polar Museum, Cambridge, the Royal Academy, London; Potsdam Kunstverein and Museum of Contemporary Art, Hangzhou, China. Her work is held in private and public collections including the Stadtmuseum, Berlin; Potsdam Museum; the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; New Art Gallery, Walsall; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery; Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth; and the V&A, London.

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 research is centred very broadly around the psychological side of migration.

Using a variety of methodologies, the majority of my research focuses on ways to improve relationships between people of different backgrounds, and on improving health and well-being of ethnic and religious minority groups, particularly refugees. I like to explore these topics from a multidisciplinary and policy-focused perspective, for example by investigating how refugee resettlement policies can optimise integration and well-being of refugees. I also explore the link between the use of digital technologies and well-being among refugees. I have conducted research with a variety of majority and minority groups in the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, and Chile.

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

Andre Viljoen is a leading figure researching the architectural and urban design consequences of sustainable urban food systems.

An architect, researcher and teacher in sustainability and urban design, Andre's work engages locally and internationally with artists, designers, architects, policy and communities.

Much of his research is undertaken collaboratively with colleague Katrin Bohn, and is cross disciplinary, bridging the arts, design and planning. He has also led pedagogic research into teaching and learning in design.

He and Bohn have contributed to, and set up, international conferences, exhibitions and workshops presenting architectural design research. Following the 2005 publication of their book "Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: designing urban agriculture for sustainable cities", the number of invitations by academic, and civic organisations has expanded to include research and dissemination activities in public and professional audiences in Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Additionally, invited articles about the concept have been published widely, including in China, Korea and Russia.

Between 2013 and 2016 Andre was elected Chair of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) Special Interest Group: Sustainable Food Planning, and he continues as a member of the group’s advisory board.

Viljoen and Bohn’s research has been recognised externally by the architectural profession, agencies and activists.

In 2015, the book Second Nature Urban Agriculture, edited by Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn won the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) international 2015 President's Award for outstanding university located research. This follows a 2007 shortlisting for the same award for their earlier book, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs).

The United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies, 2010 Policy Report, Cities, Biodiversity and Governance: Perspectives and Challenges of the Implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity at the City Level, referrers to the Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes concept as “a powerful urban design instrument for achieving local sustainability while reducing cities’ ecological footprints” (Pp 31-32).

Referring to the book “Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes” 2005, Rob Hopkins founder of the Transition Towns movement wrote, “Andre Viljoen has put together a book of the most profound importance at this point in history. How will we feed our cities beyond the age of cheap oil?” (26 Apr 2006 on “Transition Culture”).

And from the 21st October 2014, also by Rob Hopkins, on “Transition network”.

“Second Nature Urban Agriculture is pretty extraordinary.  If we are to create built environments which are ‘locked in’ to the radically low carbon future we need to be creating, we really can’t afford to build any new developments that don’t include urban agriculture.  It needs to be everywhere, and clearly at the moment that isn’t happening fast enough.  Viljoen and Bohn tackle this from a range of angles, and there is something here to inspire those anywhere along a spectrum from, at one end, wondering how to grow food where they live in a city, to, at the other, planners and designers wanting to undertake ambitious scale projects.  Hard to recommend it highly enough.”

As part of Tokyo’s hosting of the 2020 Olympics, Andre was invited as one of four international experts to advise a team from Tokyo University and the Mayor’s office for the City of Nerima in Tokyo, on plans for the 2019 World Urban Agriculture Summit.

In 2023 he was invited to join the Expert Evaluation Panel, for bids to the European Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) call for research and innovation proposals, part of the framework program Horizon Europe and co-funded by the European Commission. Three main topics are included in this call: Positive Energy Districts, 15-minute City, and Circular Urban Economies.

He is a member of the Greater Brighton Economic Board’s 2023 task and finish group developing a Greater Brighton Food Plan.

Dr Helen Walker is a Senior Lecturer teaching on MSc Town Planning, School of Architecture and Design.  Prior to joining the University of Brighton she taught at University of Sussex before appointment as Chair of Department of Urban Development and Regeneration at the University of Westminster.  These roles included supervision at Masters and Doctoral level.

A qualified town planner, Helen formerly worked in local authority planning departments before moving into central government, firstly at the Environment Agency and subsequently as Senior Policy Advisor, Skills and Knowledge Team, Neighbourhood Renewal Unit.  She was appointed as Interim Research and Programme Director, Academy for Sustainable Communities; subsequently HCA Skills and Knowledge Unit at the Office of Deputy Prime Minister, now MHCLG.  Here she was also associate supervisor on the joint ODPM / ESRC post doctoral research studentship programme, supervising civil servants undertaking doctoral and post-doctoral research.

Helen was appointed as National Advisor: Sustainable Communities and Partnerships, Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government and subsequently as a Specialist Adviser, House of Commons DCLG Select Committee.  She advised the Inquiry into built environment skills: Planning Matters – labour shortages and skills gaps also hearings for CLG Annual Report / Performance of the Department, and Coastal Communities.

Approach to teaching

In my teaching I endeavour to draw on my background in professional practice in the UK and also work overseas for the British Council.  Wherever possible my lectures are illustrated with project based examples drawn from professional experience.  The challenge of teaching planning topics to post graduates who are currently working in local planning departments ensures that teaching materials, content and approaches are up to date and relevant.

Research interests

My research interests are in the history of Town Planning, particularly the impetus for establishment of National Parks, the Garden City movement, emergence of community engagement.  Other interests are political influences on the planning process, including regional government (and its demise), history of architecture and urban design.

Education/Academic qualification

Helen has a BA (Hons) in Urban Studies, an MA and DPhil in Contemporary British History

Keywords

Town Planning, history, theory of urban form, political movements, community engagement

 

• Social inequality and mental distress
• Critical community psychology
• Informal therapeutic spaces and settings
• Statactivism and academic activism
• Multi-stakeholder capacity building action-research in communities
• Care and young people with complex needs

My research encompasses avian ecology and conservation, focusing on human-bird interactions, urban ecology, citizen science, and extinction risk. I'm passionate about sharing my sense of wonder and excitement about the natural world, including finding effective ways to (re)connect people (particularly children and teenagers) with nature. I am a strong proponent of the conservation optimism movement, evidence-based conservation, and research transparency.

My research focuses on community voices in town planning in New Towns Harlow and Hatfield. I am exploring the main players in the planning system in both towns, and the social, historical, political, economic or physical background to the towns which results in certain voices being more prominent than others in local planning matters. 

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.

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

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

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

My research interests are: yoga, forced migration, phenomenology, intersectionality, leisure and religion

My initial research plan was on everyday life’s care of oil palm smallholders/family farms in Kalimantan, Indonesia when I started my PhD in 2019. When COVID made the ethnographic work impossible, I shifted to “Gendered Analysis of Family farm’s Care in Indonesian Oil Palm Sustainable Policy Discourse”. 

My research is informed by Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) and critical development studies. I recently started exploring the travelling theory from post-colonial thinker to make sense of my understanding of care as I travel from different spaces (Global North-South) and across my life stage.

Before joining the School of Environment and Technology at the University of Brighton as WEGO ITN early-stage researcher at the end of March 2019, I supported research and community programs with international, regional and national research institutes and NGOs. I contributed to research on a wide range of issues on land rights, rural development and gender equality. The last research I supported was governing oil palm for sustainable and gender-inclusive landscapes with the Center of International Forestry Research (CIFOR). 

WEGO-ITN: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 764908.

Sean Heath is Social Anthropologist specializing in the body, movement, the senses, and human-water interactions. He has conducted research with competitive swimmers in Canada and the UK which examined the sensory aspects of immersion in water and the sociality of club swimming and how these affect youths’ wellbeing. He has also examined the emplaced entanglements between the material, social, and emotional experiences of outdoor swimming in “natural” environments.  

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 project, Inventing Kinship: a participatory art exploration of kinship with queer migrants in Brighton is an interdisciplinary project distributed between human geography, queer kinship and the arts, exploring practices and expressions of queer kinship among queer migrants through participatory creative methods.

My research is an analysis of the forms and modes of femininity mobilised by North Korean migrant women vloggers on YouTube. I see these women's self-mediated femininity as a significant site enmeshed with their substantial lives and dominant power politics in contemporary South Korea. My research interests involve self-representation, microcelebrity, gender performance and postfeminism.

Francesca Kilpatrick is a Doctoral Researcher in climate communications, looking at how security and insecurity is conceptualised within the UK climate movement. Her PhD is funded by the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership. She is Senior Editor of Interfere Journal for Critical Theory and Radical Politics, which is produced by the UoB postgraduate community. She is the PGR Representative for the Centre for Spatial, Cultural and Environmental Politics and is part of the Centre for Applied Politics, Philosophy and Economics. She teaches undergraduate qualitative and quantitative research methods at UoB, and on the MSc in Sustainable Resources at UCL.

Francesca's academic background is in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, moving to International Relations and Social Research Methods at post-graduate level, and now working in interdisciplinary research covering fields including Comparative Politics, Social Movement Studies, Security Studies and Policy Studies. Her specific academic interests include environmental politics, climate communications, climate policy, environmental and climate campaigning, climate justice and climate security

My current PhD research is focused on social aspects of rewilding. I am interest in the relationship between humans and nature, in particular, our separation and alienation from it. Rewilding I believe to be a product of this alienation, a desire to repair this dysfunction in society. However, unless we are critical of the problems that caused this breakdown (such as capitalism, private land ownership, colonialism) we may simply be reproducing the same problems.

My research is in the state of flow and transcendence in the experience of screendance. This is a PaR research and my body of work will be mainly in film and visual arts, featuring movement and dance, and predominantly concerned with the felt creative experience, its transference and interconnection between artist as filmmaker and performer and the implications for the viewer.

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.

My research interests include HIV and Gender, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), Gender-Based Violence (GBV), Migration as well as Mental Health in the United Kingdom and in Zimbabwe. My ongoing PhD study is on FGM, Gender and Social Work- Working Title: "Female Genital Mutilation (FGM/C) in the SE UK: A Narrative Analysis of Professionals’ and of Affectees’ Engagement with Social Work Practice".

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 cultural 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. 

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.

I want to investigate how international development agencies, which harbour colonial legacy, reproduce western liberal norms through their policies and practices, especially in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) financial inclusion toolkit. To this end, I am studying the Yoruba people of Nigeria understanding of the self- obligation -society nexus and contrast it with the western liberal tradition, which has element of colonial sentiment in its historical origin, about the self and how it binds itself to society through a social contract. I want to find out how far international development agencies are welded to the western liberal tradition. My hypothesis is that these norms is part of colonial legacy and tool which are used to impose on African people without consideration for African understandings of the self, obligation and society.  

Furthermore, I will argue that the western liberal tradition is limited both in its understanding of the self and in its thinking of society. As such, I will postulate that social policy, economic and political development in Africa would look radically different if the western canon of international development studies and its social policy ideas were decolonised by being opened to Africans’ ancestral understanding of the self, obligation and society. I will use the Yoruba philosophical tradition and Nigeria as a case in point.  

This research will be guided by the following three key research questions.  

a) What are the policy implications of ignoring African ancestral understandings of the self – obligation – society in the implementation of financial inclusion?   

b) Does the SDGs’ financial inclusion framework reproduce liberal contractarian norms?   

c) In what ways would openness to African understandings of the nexus of the self – obligation – society transform and decolonise the theory and practice of development? 

Alice is researching the knowlege politics of fracking and uncoventional fossil fuel extraction in the UK, critically examining whose knowledge comes to matter in this unfolding conflict over the environment and over contemporary democracy. Adopting approaches from Feminist Political Ecology, Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Justice, Alice is researching with the communities who have been mobilising diverse expertise and tactics to contest the arrival of the industry. 

WEGO-ITN: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 764908

My research interests predominantly come under the umbrella of urban injustice. I am currently focusing on gentrification and displacement, but have previously undertaken research into homelessness and the community/voluntary sector. Within gentrification, I am interested in the full spectrum of im/mobilities encompassed by gentrification-induced-displacement, bringing a mobilities lens to understand the processes of un-homing and loss of a sense of place. I am interested in finding out the specific ways gentrification is manifesting and experienced at the urban seaside, looking at the relationship between tourism and gentrification. Furthermore, I am interested in theories of justice, particularly social, spatial and mobility justice.

I am also interested in creative, participatory, multisensory and mobile methods. I have developed a socio-sonic-mobile methodology using listening as a method. My doctoral project explores how listening practices can elicit people’s changing relationships to place. I am working with a local community music organisation to learn and share how listening activities and sound walks can be used as a tool for both research, community engagement and wellbeing purposes. This also furthers my interest in understanding how universities can work with local communities for mutual benefit. 

Research focused specifically on examining media and climate justice is still scarce (Roosvall and Tegelberg, 2015) yet growing, and to date none explores the media representation of climate justice in relation to food security. Given the differential impacts of climate change on food security in the global North and South, I analyse the media discourses on climate induced food insecurity in tabloids and broadsheets in the UK and Mexico to evaluate how food security as an aspect of climate justice is discursively presented. With this project I will identify similarities and differences in the representation of aspects such as problem definition, causes and solutions, the actors portrayed, the prominence given to the topic, the specific national concerns and who has the power to influence discourses.

I am an artist, writer and researcher based in North Herefordshire, UK. My creative interests use photography to explore the relationship between humans and the natural world through a research-based practice. Inspired the by increased popularity in the concept of plant-intelligence, particularly in a world in which climate concern and anxiety is an ever increasing norm, I use traditional and alternative modes of photography to interrogate how humans conceptualise the plant-kingdom through mythological, scientific and cultural practices. 

This is specifically explored in my part-time, practice-based PhD project titled ‘Photosymbiosis: Towards a Photographic Method of Collaboration with England's Heritage Oak Trees’, which uses traditional and alternative modes of photographic practice to examine the role of twelve heritage oak trees, through the lens of scientific research that considers the agency and intelligence of plants. By involving the oak tree within the creative process, whether through its material (its soil, bark, or leaves, for example) or biological functions, my practice seeks to (re)centre the plant as a sensual being, while also acknowlodging certain tree's status as a cultural object, imbued with emotional, social, cultural, and political value that raise certain plants to heritage status.

Alterntatively, my written work often uses queer experiences of gender and sexuality, through the use of poetry and short-form prose, to investigate human relationships, relationships to place and personal events.

My research interests focus on the potential of social media for sustainability discourse in cruise tourism. How do cruise tourists negotiate the boundaries of sustainability regarding their holiday? Which emotions are involved in these discourses? How are these emotions managed? I explore these questions in my PhD project “Cruising with a Conscience: Navigating moral identity and the ethics of sustainability in the cruise community.”

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.

The PhD project I am currently working on is researching trans and non-binary embodied experiences and the implications for urban planning theory and practice. How does contemporary English local planning practice incorporate gender into policy and practice? Can planning be inclusive of trans and non-binary residents?

I am utilising creative mapping methods to explore trans and non-binary embodiment and spatialities, alongside discourse analysis and stakeholder interviews to understand local planning practice.

My research interests are contemporary urban governance and the role of planning within this; the geographies of gender and sexuality; British planning and it's relationship to colonialism; queer and transfeminist political praxis.

My practice-based doctoral research uses design to observe, engage and intervene in contemporary UK public breastfeeding discourses. This research focuses on gender, care, food, culture and motherhood and critically examines the role of design in relation to complex issues of sustainability.

My work explores counter-conventional approaches to research and practice across design and health disciplines. I am interested in how design can create meaningful dialogue using critical thinking and designed artefacts. 

My research interests are Radical methodologies, Design Culture(s), Design Anthropology; Research Through Design; Design for social change; Design and sustainability; Intersectional feminist design agency; How design can positively impact health inequalities; The impact of design on everyday life, behaviours, norms, practices and belief systems. 

My recent interests are design(ing) for peace and intersecting issues of justice, and how the discipline of design reinforces gender based violence and oppressive class politics.

https://twitter.com/ahrcpress/status/1212358091917971456

Together with Ben Sweeting and Tom Ainsworth I am a co-founder of the Radical Methodologies Research and Enterprise Group. Please see the blog for further information on the group.

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