Who we are

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

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

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

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

1.       Activism in repressive contexts

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

2.       Student movements and the political role of universities

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

3.       Transnational Solidarity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.     Human Rights and the Politics of Resistance

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

 3.     Decolonial  Ethics

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

 4. Law, Ethics and Democracy

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

Additional Roles: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affiliations:

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

My primary research focus is in the field of political economy. I am interested in ideas of ownership of resources, particularly in alternative models of public ownership informed by anarchist and Marxist traditions and how these approaches can relate to radical understandings of democracy and ‘ideal’ or ‘developmental’ conceptions of liberty.

I am also interested in how we conceptualise sustainability in political discourse, and in the role of technology and social media in creating and maintaining economic subjectivities, especially as understood through Frankfurt School critical theory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

German is currently co-authoring a book with Professor Mark Devenney, Troubling Democracy: On Practices of Care, Fugitivity, and Refusal, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. His first monograph, The Political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben (Bloomsbury, 2019), examines the relationship between political ontology and violence. His broader research explores how relational ontologies shape contemporary critical theory and radical philosophy.

My recent publications include:

Primera, German. "Agamben y la Signatura de la Secularización: entre lo Profano y lo Postsecular" in Azucena Blanco (ed.), Los Estudios Postseculares de la Literatura: Teoría, Historia y Crítica, Tiran lo Branch Editores, (Forthcoming, 2025).

Primera, German. (2024) "Institución y Fugitividad: La Italian Theory y el Reto de la Teoría Crítica Negra" in Alfonso Galindo (ed.), La institución o la vida: un análisis filosófico, Guillermo Escolar Editor, Madrid.

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

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

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

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

Primera, German. (2019) ‘Introduction to the Thought of Roberto Esposito’ in The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader, eds. D. Rose and M. Lewis. London; New York: Bloomsbury

Primera, German. (2019) ‘Giorgio Agamben’ in The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader, eds. D. Rose and M. Lewis. London; New York: Bloomsbury

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

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

In previous work, he has explored neoliberalism, sovereignty, and governmentality through the lenses of French poststructuralism and Italian political thought. His research on political violence and biopolitics interrogates the dynamics of exclusion and their relationship to liberal democracy. This has led him to engage in post-Marxist debates on populism and radical democracy, including participation in the Transnational Populist Politics project (Buenos Aires 2015; Brighton 2016, 2017).

Selected Conference Presentations

“Institución y Fugitividad: La Italian Theory y el reto de la teoría critica negra” en Seminario Internacional Escrit: Estudio y Critica de la Italian Theory. Murcia, 7-8 Junio 2023

“The Politics of Inoperativity and the Homo Sacer Project” en Congreso Internacional: Agamben, La Urgencia del Pensamiento. Granada, Oct 2022

“Political Theology and Inoperativity.” Society for European Philosophy / Forum for European Philosophy Joint Annual Conference, Royal Holloway, London (2019).

“Logistics, Biopolitics and Ordering.” Violence, Space and the Political, National University of Ireland, Galway (2018).

“The Signature of Secularisation: The Profane Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben.” London Conference in Critical Thought, London South Bank University (2017).

“Violence, Biopolitics and Resistance.” The Meaning of Violence, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2017).

“Resisting Biopolitics: Destituent Power and Inoperativity.” British Political Studies Association Conference, University of Brighton (2016).

“Extrajudicial Killings in Colombia.” Theorising Transnational Populist Politics, Buenos Aires (2015).

“Disposable Life and Neoliberalism.” CAPPE, University of Brighton (2014).

“The Signature of Life: From Butler’s Social Ontology to Agamben’s Politicisation of Ontology.” Critical Studies Research Group, Brighton (2014).

“Neoliberalism, Governmentality and Bare Life.” ACLA, New York University (2014).

“Agamben, the Proper and the Improper.” University of the West of England, Bristol (2014).

“Extra-judicial Killings and Bare Life in Colombia.” University of Brighton (2014).

Supervisory Interests

German welcomes supervision in areas including contemporary continental philosophy (especially French poststructuralism and Italian thought), biopolitics, Black studies, post-Marxism, the politics of war, political violence, and modern political thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Funded Projects

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

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

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

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

Events/projects/conferences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Videos from the conference:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current PhD funding opportunities:

ESRC SC DTP

AHRC TECHNE

Future Societies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My doctoral research critically unpacks the complexities of becoming free in, against and beyond the racial nation-state of india with a focus on the Shaheen Bagh protests, part of the wider nationwide anti-CAA movement (2019-20). 

I engage activist, media and academic discourses to interrogate the limits of recognition and legibility, suggesting instead the potentiality of Shaheen Bagh as a politics of hope grounded in prefiguration, refusal and abolition.

My research is funded by the AHRC Techne DTP.

Teaching: PO604 Race and International Relations (2024/5) HD423 Artist, Designer, Prosumer (2022/3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

My research interests fall under the umbrella of linguistic pragmatics, that is the study of utterance interpretation and meaning in context. I am not a traditional linguist. In my work I look into areas that are not considered linguistic... property, such as emotions, art and aesthetics. Artworks communicate something slippery that often words cannot fully express; they communicate something ineffable. And that to me, it's really exciting! 

In my work, I explore the concept of ineffability in verbal and non-verbal art and aesthetic experience. My framework is relevance theory, a theory of communication and cognition. I'm looking into how relevance theory can be applied to aesthetics and the interpretation of art and also what is the role of emotions in aesthetic appreciation. In my thesis, I also look into the influence of neuroaesthetics, ekphrastic poetry, and the ineffability of the Parthenon Sculptures. In a rather recent epiphany I had (it happens sometimes!), a few months before I started my final year, I designed a pilot study. I conducted ten semi-structured individual interviews during which participants were asked to perform an aesthetic judgement task, an affective task and a selection task. The stimuli for the tasks were images of paintings and sculptures and two haiku poems. Apart from the tasks, I included questions on aesthetic experience based on the participants' recent or past experiences with an artwork of their choice. I used relevance theory as an exploratory method of analysis to interpret and discuss the data. 

My work has been influenced by a recent affective turn in relevance-theoretic pragmatics and Tim Wharton's work on pragmatics and emotion. The working title of my doctoral thesis is Art, affect, and mind: Exploring the ineffable. 

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

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

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

unreadability

irrealism

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

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