The central question animating my work is what sustains life in the face of loss.
My research interests include love and loss, attention, the social science of flourishing, our relationship to place, the ethics and methods of telling stories about suffering, and how beauty and joy help us live with what hurts.
You can learn more about some recent research projects below.
Love, care, and attention in the face of loss
How might we understand loss differently if we ask about the practices that sustain life? This research project considers how love and care help us imagine lives in the face of loss.
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the German Research Foundation, the project unfolds in partnership with Dr Philipp Schulz at the University of Hamburg and in collaboration with a team of researchers in Colombia, Germany, Scotland, and Uganda.
In all our work, we embrace an ethic and methodology of alongsideness, which considers what sustains life alongside what threatens its continuation. Recognising the goodness that persists in the face of loss does not negate the reality of suffering, just as paying attention to ongoing harms need not render us impermeable to tenderness. Love, violence, care, loss, joy, and harm exist alongside each other in ways that enable life, create tensions, and are worthy of our curiosity.
You can learn more about our work at the dedicated project website.
Growing roots: Creating (with) a sense of place
How is creative work rooted in place? How does place shape one’s sense of self and relationships, and how does Scotland as a place show up in people’s creative work? How do artists enact stewardship and channel care towards the places they love? And what links emerge between land, place, and community?
Funded by the Scotland’s Future Series, this project examines the connections between creativity, place, and community. It has involved hosting a series of public conversations with creative people across Scotland about their relationship to place. Events have featured award-winning musicians, writers, librarians, and museum curators and have taken place at the Glasgow Women’s Library and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
You can read a write-up of one such event here.
The politics of victimhood
The category of ‘victim’ is not a mere description of having suffered harm, but a political status and a potential site of power. Yet, not all victims are created equal. In this project, I investigate the politics of victimhood as a feminist question. Rather than merely asserting that victimhood is political, I ask what kinds of politics it enables and forecloses.
This research project has emerged from my in-depth engagement with the Colombian peace and justice process. As of 2023, over nine million Colombians have secured official recognition as victims of an armed conflict that has lasted decades. I show how victimhood has become a pillar of reimagining the state in the wake of war, and of bringing a vision of that state into being through bureaucratic encounters. Encompassing acts of care, agency, and haunting, the politics of victimhood entangle people who identify as victims, researchers, and peace and justice professionals.
Research for this project was made possible thanks to grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the United States Institute of Peace, the Folke Bernadotte Academy, the Henry J. Leir Institute, and the World Peace Foundation.
You can learn more about the findings of this research in my book Good Victims: The Political as a Feminist Question.
If you’d rather listen to a podcast about this book and the research underpinning it, here is an episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, part of the New Books Network.