pathway: Security, Conflict and Human Rights

Broadly speaking, my research examines how the securitisation of infectious disease (re)produces social representations of health and illness that construct certain groups as the ‘Other’. This project situates itself within wider debates as to the scope and relative normative strength of security frameworks within the global health.  As a researcher, I am interested in the epistemic value of co-production and seek to incorporate a participatory ethic into this PhD project.

I critically examine the European Asylum and Immigration legal regime with a focus on struggles around privacy and family life. This right is routinely violated during asylum determination, the very process that is designed to afford protection to refugees. As part of this research, I will conduct analysis with ethnographic methods and primarily engage with LGBTQIA+ refugees in Greece, who are often in the precarious position of having to share private information for their claims to be processed. My goals include: assessing the extent of unauthorised breaches of privacy during asylum determination processes, and proposing effective remedies for the future.

My study aims to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the new PSHEE content in schools surrounding the topics of domestic-abuse and healthy relationships. Whilst the need to include young people in the fight against domestic-abuse has been recognised by the inclusion of this content, the quality and the impact on young people remains unclear without evaluation. My project aims to generate insightful data to analyse any changes in participants’ attitude and knowledge, develop a theory of change to understand the mechanisms of attitudinal change in education surrounding domestic-abuse and make recommendations to enhance the programme and teacher training.

Despite considerable contribution of research, policy reviews, reform attempts, and the introduction of specialist rape investigation units, the criminal justice response to rape remains problematic. There is limited research examining police decision-making in rape cases, despite their role as ‘gatekeepers’ to the CJS. My PhD will explore decision-making from the perspectives of victim-survivors and police officers, to understand:

• victim-survivor and police decision-making during police rape investigations and the context within which they occur;
• the relationship between police and victim-survivor decision-making during this stage;
• the interplay between the ecological environment of police and victim-survivors and factors impacting on case progression.

My research explores the role of drugs-related violence and drug policy in Colombia’s transitional justice process, with a focus on historical memory. I consider how counter-drug and security policies have shaped the experiences and memories of armed conflict of rural farmers living in drug-producing regions of Colombia. I hope to explore how these marginalised memories can facilitate dialogue about the root causes of conflict in Colombia and promote peacebuilding.

Taking an intersectional approach, considering dimensions of race, space, class, generation and power, and employing a mixed methodology of ethnographic, oral history and community-based participatory action, this research aims to consider the ways in which narratives of memory can be (re)produced, recognised or resisted through the (often competing) structures and patterns of remembering in South Africa. Spatially, the scope of this research will seek to create distinctions between the ways in which such narratives, grounded in social discourse, are mobilised within formal, official spaces aimed at obligating interaction with the past, such as museums and sites of memory, and within informal, quotidian spaces, such as communities, concerned with change for the future.

My research focus is on the current refugee situation in Calais, addressing primarily the reasons for – and impact of – the police violence towards the refugees. Viewing the situation through a socio-political lens, I will explore the factors surrounding and ‘permitting’ the violence to occur, and what this means for our understanding of human rights and security for refugees. My research will consider the various political dynamics embodied in the situation, and from this evaluate whether a necropolitical theory can be seen to understand the violence and attitudes towards the refugees.

My research focuses on the Colombian peace process and the reintegration of the FARC-EP following the signing of the peace agreement with the Colombian government in November 2016. In particular, I tackle the question of identity construction, exploring first how this process is framed and bounded within the institutional discourse of reincorporation, and then how this unfolds in the realities of transitioning to civilian life. I deconstruct the problematic binaries that reintegration so often encourages and frames, and explore how the boundaries of belonging are being reshaped and redrawn so that communities can come together, despite the horrors of war.

I am currently researching the complex and varied range of actors that are involved in the landscape of cybersecurity. These are not just state or military actors, but also private corporations and individuals, materials, technologies and all sorts of other actants, something which no single theory or framework in international relations or science and technology studies (STS) seems able to address at present. I want to investigate whether an interdisciplinary approach can help conceptualise this landscape more clearly, drawing on IR, security studies, STS and the philosophy of technology amongst others.

I use a gendered analytic approach to explore the (re)configurations of the human subject in machine learning practices.