Research interests
care, beauty, and joy in the shadow of war and peace | the politics of victimhood |reflexive pedagogy | the politics of nature and place| critical transitional justice | ethics and methods of researching political violence| narrative and storytelling in the study of politics
Current research projects
A different kind of war story: Centring love and care in peace and conflict studies
This project has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG). My co-Principal Investigator on this project is Dr Philipp Schulz. You can listen to a brief podcast conversation about this ongoing work here, and you can read more about some of the origin story of this project here.
This project centers relations and practices of love and care in the wake of loss. The main objective is to investigate how love and care illuminate different meanings of politics. Informed by interdisciplinary literature on the anthropology of love, the ethics of care, feminist peace and conflict studies, political theory, and thinking on place and the more-than-human, the concepts of love, care, and loss are deliberately not pre-defined, with the hope that this will allow space for varied interlocutors to imbue these practices with diverse meanings. Our own departure points are:
This project centers relations and practices of love and care in the wake of loss. The main objective is to investigate how love and care illuminate different meanings of politics. Informed by interdisciplinary literature on the anthropology of love, the ethics of care, feminist peace and conflict studies, political theory, and thinking on place and the more-than-human, the concepts of love, care, and loss are deliberately not pre-defined, with the hope that this will allow space for varied interlocutors to imbue these practices with diverse meanings. Our own departure points are:
- Love and care are active practices, not passive emotions.
- Love and care extend beyond the romantic, intimate, sexual, and/or familial to encompass a broader set of relations.
- Love and care are not synonymous, and are potentially steeped in contradictions that are generative for further analytic and theoretical inquiry.
- The losses people experience go beyond acts of direct violence to include grief, climate-related ecological losses and anxieties, the COVID-19 pandemic and its ongoing legacies, and other events. A broad imagination of loss will illuminate the political work of love and care more fully than a narrow focus on the violence of armed conflict.
- Love and care also shape researchers' and practitioners' relationship to their identity, their subject matter, and to each other in ways that merit investigation.
Growing roots: Creating a sense of place
This project sheds light on how Scottish professionals (and professionals working in Scotland) reflect on place in and through their work. I engage with musicians, singer-songwriters, museum curators, librarians, writers, and others to discuss: How is creative work, and one's own sense of self and relationships, rooted in place? What role does Scotland – as a place – play in creative work, and in what ways does it show up in what and how people create? How do people practice care towards place and how do they enact stewardship and care? What links emerge between land(scape), place, and community? The first round of events in the summer of 2023, supported by the Scotland's Future Series, is carried out in partnership with the Glasgow Women's Library and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Moss and wildflowers, birds and rivers do not merely represent an "escape" or a form of solace (though they have provided both at times), nor are they exclusively the sites that remind us of climate destruction; rather, they are veritable companions that shape how we can think about relations of care, grief, and survival alike. This realization may have originated for me during my humanitarian work in conflict-affected environments, but it also applies to settings in which political violence is not as readily observable–sites at which other forms of oppression, marginalization, exclusion, and harm persist. This project seeks to center the moss, wildflowers, birds, and rivers and, thus, to reorient where we look for conflict and peace. I turn my attention to sites that political violence scholarship has often neglected: botanic gardens, wildflower meadows that grow in the wake of bombings, online communities that gather to share knowledge on plants. These seemingly disparate sites tell stories about nationalism and colonialism, about community and activism, about beauty, survival, and even thriving. How does beauty hide violence and co-exist alongside it? How are sites of beauty also sites of violence, and how are sites of violence also sites of care? And what notions of politics come to the fore when we take these stories seriously?
Work on this project has been possible thanks to generous funding from the Scotland's Future Series programme at the University of St Andrews. As part of the programme, I am curating a series of events in which creative practitioners based in Scotland reflect on how place has shaped their work, sense of self, and relationships. See here a write-up of one such event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2023.
Moss and wildflowers, birds and rivers do not merely represent an "escape" or a form of solace (though they have provided both at times), nor are they exclusively the sites that remind us of climate destruction; rather, they are veritable companions that shape how we can think about relations of care, grief, and survival alike. This realization may have originated for me during my humanitarian work in conflict-affected environments, but it also applies to settings in which political violence is not as readily observable–sites at which other forms of oppression, marginalization, exclusion, and harm persist. This project seeks to center the moss, wildflowers, birds, and rivers and, thus, to reorient where we look for conflict and peace. I turn my attention to sites that political violence scholarship has often neglected: botanic gardens, wildflower meadows that grow in the wake of bombings, online communities that gather to share knowledge on plants. These seemingly disparate sites tell stories about nationalism and colonialism, about community and activism, about beauty, survival, and even thriving. How does beauty hide violence and co-exist alongside it? How are sites of beauty also sites of violence, and how are sites of violence also sites of care? And what notions of politics come to the fore when we take these stories seriously?
Work on this project has been possible thanks to generous funding from the Scotland's Future Series programme at the University of St Andrews. As part of the programme, I am curating a series of events in which creative practitioners based in Scotland reflect on how place has shaped their work, sense of self, and relationships. See here a write-up of one such event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2023.
"Good Victims": The Political As A Feminist Question
The book associated with this project, Good Victims, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024.
"This is the era of the victims,” declared the High Commissioner for Peace in Colombia in his June 2014 address to the Colombian Senate. Yet, not all victims are created equal. Victimhood does not merely describe an experience of harm; it is also a political status and a site of power that shapes claim-making, relationships, and experiences of justice during transitions from violence. During my decade of work as a humanitarian practitioner in Colombia and elsewhere, I observed a tension between two narratives about victimhood. On the one hand, "the victims" are often imagined as a monolith, an undifferentiated collective. On the other hand, those who identify as victims (or vie for recognition as such) refer to themselves and others as good victims, invisible victims, forgotten victims, privileged victims, or (un)desirable victims. In this second narrative, victimhood is always modified by an adjective.
In this research project I ask: What does it mean to be a “good victim”? How is victimhood produced and performed—by representatives of the state and those who identify as victims alike —in order to be legible in the context of transitional justice processes? And what are the implications of these constructed hierarchies for theories and experiences of justice during transitions from violence? Drawing from in-depth fieldwork in Colombia, I focus specifically on the bureaucratic production of hierarchies through state mechanisms of transitional justice. I also explore the ways in which those who identify as victims challenge, subvert, or reinforce these dynamics.
This interdisciplinary project is grounded in anthropological literature on suffering, complemented by insights from the fields of transitional justice, feminist theory, and critical humanitarianism. I theorize the political, material, and emotional stakes of victimhood and illustrate how hierarchies shape interactions with the state and experiences of justice during transitions from violence.
Research for this project has been possible thanks to generous funding support in the form of 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.
"This is the era of the victims,” declared the High Commissioner for Peace in Colombia in his June 2014 address to the Colombian Senate. Yet, not all victims are created equal. Victimhood does not merely describe an experience of harm; it is also a political status and a site of power that shapes claim-making, relationships, and experiences of justice during transitions from violence. During my decade of work as a humanitarian practitioner in Colombia and elsewhere, I observed a tension between two narratives about victimhood. On the one hand, "the victims" are often imagined as a monolith, an undifferentiated collective. On the other hand, those who identify as victims (or vie for recognition as such) refer to themselves and others as good victims, invisible victims, forgotten victims, privileged victims, or (un)desirable victims. In this second narrative, victimhood is always modified by an adjective.
In this research project I ask: What does it mean to be a “good victim”? How is victimhood produced and performed—by representatives of the state and those who identify as victims alike —in order to be legible in the context of transitional justice processes? And what are the implications of these constructed hierarchies for theories and experiences of justice during transitions from violence? Drawing from in-depth fieldwork in Colombia, I focus specifically on the bureaucratic production of hierarchies through state mechanisms of transitional justice. I also explore the ways in which those who identify as victims challenge, subvert, or reinforce these dynamics.
This interdisciplinary project is grounded in anthropological literature on suffering, complemented by insights from the fields of transitional justice, feminist theory, and critical humanitarianism. I theorize the political, material, and emotional stakes of victimhood and illustrate how hierarchies shape interactions with the state and experiences of justice during transitions from violence.
Research for this project has been possible thanks to generous funding support in the form of 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.
Ethical and methodological guidance for reflexive applied research in development
This project was carried out in collaboration with Elizabeth Hoffecker, Kendra Leith, and Kimberley Wilson, and in partnership with MIT D-Lab and Tufts University.
Read more here.
Interdisciplinary scholarly literature considers the potentially adverse effects of the research process on its participants. Our approach addresses the processes and practices of operational research, conducted either by practitioner organizations independently or in partnership with academic institutions. Operational research, which encompasses monitoring and evaluation, needs assessments, and other activities that are sometimes not readily labeled 'research', represents an intervention in the lives of participants. The ethical and methodological dilemmas of this intervention have received less attention than purely academic discussions of human subject research. How can operational researchers meaningfully reckon with the effects of the research process on both those conducting it and those participating in it throughout the research cycle? This approach, co-developed over several years through engagement with operational researchers across sectors, treats the experience of the research process as a site of power that ought to be considered as seriously as the substance and findings of the research intervention. The approach consists of four principles to promote more rigorous, relevant, right-sized, and respectful research, a framework of questions that operational researchers and their organizations can consider when carrying out this kind of work, and illustrations of the application of these tools in a range of contexts.
Read more here.
Interdisciplinary scholarly literature considers the potentially adverse effects of the research process on its participants. Our approach addresses the processes and practices of operational research, conducted either by practitioner organizations independently or in partnership with academic institutions. Operational research, which encompasses monitoring and evaluation, needs assessments, and other activities that are sometimes not readily labeled 'research', represents an intervention in the lives of participants. The ethical and methodological dilemmas of this intervention have received less attention than purely academic discussions of human subject research. How can operational researchers meaningfully reckon with the effects of the research process on both those conducting it and those participating in it throughout the research cycle? This approach, co-developed over several years through engagement with operational researchers across sectors, treats the experience of the research process as a site of power that ought to be considered as seriously as the substance and findings of the research intervention. The approach consists of four principles to promote more rigorous, relevant, right-sized, and respectful research, a framework of questions that operational researchers and their organizations can consider when carrying out this kind of work, and illustrations of the application of these tools in a range of contexts.