I’m investigating the interconnections between shifts in foreign policy, change in national identity, and regional politics. I'm employing the theoretical framework of French theorist Pierre Bourdieu, concentrating on the case of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Please email me if you wish to learn more or have an idea to share!
My PhD investigates the history and display of British military material culture, with a particular focus on the role of emotion in curatorial practice. In partnership with Cumbria’s Museum of Military Life, my research will develop a conceptual rationale and practical framework for the implementation of ‘affective curatorship’. Through the purposeful mobilising of emotions to shape interpretation, could the significance of collections items be enhanced? Could ‘affective curatorship’ give regimental museums a more meaningful way of engaging directly and deliberately with complex and varied emotional experiences, ‘controversial histories’, and ‘difficult’ objects? What are the opportunities and challenges in this? These are some of the questions I seek to address to enable a more nuanced and diverse history to be told.
My project aims to follow people through the places they visited and recorded, creating not only a thesis but also a database that will look into wider implications for early modern London's social and spatial division. Above all, I hope to uncover contemporaries’ understandings and experiences of the city space, identify personal/social networks of particular places and consider their likely evolution over time. In order to facilitate the analysis and make findings interactive, it is envisaged to map these places – a tool to highlight general connections between places as well as the way individual sites might stand out. As visualising is becoming more common among spatial historians, I believe that GIS would provide a useful method to see how people's mobility changed over time.
Xue Bai is a postgraduate researcher in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University and a Doctoral Fellow at the Lancaster University China Centre. Her research investigates the nature of China's political consumerism, focusing on historical roots and the evolution of political consumerism, the motivations of political consumers, and the relationship between political consumerism and conventional political participation in an authoritarian context.
I am interested in gender and inter-institutional dynamics in current China. Specifically, my focus is mainly on non-governmental organisations promoting gender equality.
Moreover, I am also fascinated by the current Chinese diverse nuances of feminism.
The fast-growing development of nanotechnology support the idea of 'infinitive' data storage. We are able to store more and more information. This leads us to future where we would be able to store everything. My PhD project is focused on exploring future outcomes of such vision. If we could store everything, would we be able to actually retrieve relevant information? If so, how? Would we need tools to clean our digital dirt? How will we interact with our digital world on the individual but also collective, social level if we had no storage limitations?
My thesis explores the relationship between comedy and society in Britain between about 1990 and 2010. I am particularly interested in the extent to which historians can retrieve experiences of laughter and disgust from responses to television, when immediate audience responses are not available in the archive.
More broadly, I am interested in humour, language, narrative, the intersection of politics and culture, and contemporary European and North American history. My MA dissertation focused on nostalgia for communism in the former German Democratic Republic, explored through material culture, place and film.
Currently for my PhD in Languages and Cultures, my research centres around fathering and albinism in various countries and cultural contexts around the world. I chose this research subject as there is a greater need for a specific focus on fathering and albinism - whether that be fathers of children with albinsm or fathers with albinism - as much of the available information surrounding fathering is portrayed in a negative light. Although negative instances of fathering and albinism do exist, there are also positive experiences of fathers acting as enablers for their children which are often underdiscussed. Furthermore, whilst there is a significant number of articles written specifically about mothering and albinism, there is a noticeable lack of research about fathering, which is a research gap that I would like to bridge. Therefore, I aim to try and help improve perceptions of fathering and albinism by shedding light on more positive experiences, and giving a more balanced outlook on the diverse experiences surrounding fathering and albinism.
My PhD research employs an ethnographic methodological approach to examine the experiences of female students and teachers at Islamic seminaries for women in the UK. More broadly, I am interested in women's work in the development of religious knowledge and communities, and trying to understand what this work means to these women from their own perspectives and in their specific social contexts.
Jinyuan Li is a PhD researcher in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University and a Doctoral Fellow at the Lancaster University China Centre. Her research studies anti-corruption and moral/ideological discipline in China.
Al-Majiri and Cultural Representation in Selected Literatures in Northern Nigeria
This thesis provides a cultural appraisal of the Al-Majiri child scholar as a lens to explore the causes, consequences and societal implications of the marginalisation of the Al-Majiri. Employing a multimodal approach, the research integrates postcolonial language theory, polyphony, advocacy and a violence-focused analytical framework, supplemented by interviews to enrich its methodology. To bring a multidisciplinary angle to the thesis, it explores the work of educator Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The study in its originality focuses on the representation of the Al-Majiri in Born on a Tuesday, No Sweat, Songs of Almajiri, Kasko and ‘Dan Al-Majiri’. Through the analyses of these poems, film, song and prose works, the research offers fresh insights on the Al-Majiri scholarship. It investigates how cultural art serves as a potent medium for conveying the lived experiences, struggles, and aspirations of the Al-Majiri. Fostering a deeper understanding of the lives and identities of Al-Majiri, the study seeks to provide insights for scholars and shift public perceptions of the marginalised cohort. The thesis further evaluates how cultural representations can influence government policy. Ultimately, the study highlights culture’s dual role as a mirror of societal concerns and a catalyst for change, advocating for its transformative potential in addressing the complexities of the Al-Majiri education system. To communicate with the general public, the thesis concludes with a lay summary.
Join the MSF in 2019-20 to expand the energy thematic in the MSF. Her PhD will focus on public understanding of nuclear energy in the Lancaster area and how this understanding is mediated through contemporary media, such as computer games and their narratives. Her PhD is the dept of Creative Languages and it tentatively titled ‘Temporality and Space in the Nuclear Paradigm: Exploring a “Fallout” yet to come’.
My research will focus on security and policy challenges facing innovation and technological cooperation in outer space.
I graduated from Lancaster in 2022 with a LLM International Law and Diplomacy, which I studied via distance learning, whilst working for SKA Observatory, an astronomy international organisation.
I previously graduated from Durham University with a BSc (Hons) Physics and Astronomy. I have 20 years experience of working in policy and governance in science research and other public sector organisations.
I am also interested in science diplomacy and the law and governance of international organisations.
As a historian of order, empire, and emergence, his work has historical dimensions, but is ultimately concerned with applying these with a contemporary relevance, seeking to construct histories of the present. Currently, his work focusses particularly on International Relations as a 'science of empire' and seeks to trace the historical emergence of the formalised academic discipline from a hidden past of colonial race science and eugenics whilst critically deconstructing the legitimising function that scientific discourses are co-opted to serve within the field in the present day.
Drawing on concepts of complexity, non-Newtonian approaches to time and order, and non-linear dynamics, Jude's work seeks to stretch approaches to historical study beyond the orthodox, whilst seeking to broaden these further with radical and decolonial approaches to power and order. His work thus draws on a wide and diverse theoretical framework whilst building on critical approaches that can help shed light on the practice of history and its relation to power, especially the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and others.
Amy Stanning is a second-year PhD student researching the fiscal history of late eighteenth-century Britain. She took her BA in History and her AKC at Kings' College London before beginning a career in finance. Returning to academia, Amy took her MA in International and Military History at Lancaster in 2021, being awarded prizes for her outstanding academic performance and her dissertation. Her research addresses the nature of the 'taxation revolution' of the late-eighteenth century which has for decades appeared a settled problem. Yet there is far more to the funding of the British 'fiscal-military state' than the growth of indirect taxation. The Land Tax contributed at least one fifth of revenues and was a steady and reliable source of funds. How did this happen? How was it that this tax collected by a network of lay collectors continued for so long? Why if it was so successful, was it not increased? What does this enduring tax tell us about the nature of Government and the communities which collected it? These are some of the questions Amy seeks to address.
I study the history and evolution of comics, with a strong emphasis on the relationship among these and other artistic and narrative forms (maps, chronologies, calligrams, rebus, etc.) and on the multi-panel sequential narration (frescoes, tapestries, picture books, etc.). One of the central points of my research is the attempt to overcome a literary approach to the medium in favour of a more visual one. My current research concerns both the attempt to insert comics into the wider field of data visualization and the study of comics as a medium capable of implementing scientific communication and dissemination.
In recent years family history has become increasingly popular. Researchers gather hard data from ‘vital records’ (births, marriages and deaths) and produce more and more detailed family trees. As an output this is fine, but I want to explore the wider outcomes: does the information gathered change the researcher’s view of their own identity and if so, in what way, and what are the implications and lessons for wider society?
I also want to explore how archives, libraries and museums can use the material culture they hold to preserve, interpret and transmit the complexities of identity.
Working PhD title:'The 'Mexico' Lifeboat Monument, St. Anne's on the Sea: a Symbol for a New Seaside Town and a Touchstone for Memorialization Culture'
In examining this monument at St Anne’s on the Sea, Lancashire to a lifeboat crew who lost their lives in a disaster of December 1886 I am exploring unresearched or under-researched subject areas:
Monuments memorials and memorialization as a focal point for social and economic development and community identity in a local setting.
Heroism and ‘Everyday Heroism’.
The work of the sculptor, William Birnie Rhind and how it is placed within artistic and cultural frameworks.
How Rhind’s monument should be interpreted as a civic monument, a lifeboat monument and within wider frameworks of memorialization.
I am a PhD Student at the University of Lancaster working to understand Outer Space in International Relations, in particular the security dimension of space and the role the private sector plays in this as it emerges at the forefront of humanity's 21st Century space endeavours.
I am a part-time PhD researcher studying how English Lake District pocket guidebooks and the leisure practice of fellwalking in the area have shaped each other from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. My thesis speaks to an element of the identity of the English Lake District by telling the story of the way in which pocket guidebooks increase access to the landscape by outsiders. My talk on Alfred Wainwright's Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells in the University of Cumbria's Cultural Landscape series 2021-22 is available here .
