Members and their research interests

Kirsten Campbell BA (Hons) LLB (Hons) BLitt DPhil Barrister and Solicitor (Victoria)
Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Head of Unit

Kirsten's current research develops a new social theory to explain and judge war crimes, ultimately arguing for the necessity of humanitarian law as the normative rearticulation of social bonds. This research examines the fundamental concepts of the person and social relations that underpin contemporary humanitarian law, focusing upon the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

This work builds upon two funded research projects. The first project, Regulating Armed Conflict: From The Laws Of War To Humanitarian Law, examined contemporary models of the legal regulation of armed conflict, and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

The second research project, The Codification of Trauma in Humanitarian Law, was an international collaborative project with Dr Sari Wastell, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths and Dr Hannah Starman, Institute of Ethnic Studies, Ljubljana, and was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation. This research will be published as Testifying to Trauma: The Codification of Trauma in Humanitarian Law, London: Cavendish, in 2009. A section of the research has been published as a report on the completion strategy of the ICTY, ‘Legacies of the ICTY.’

Kirsten’s research on social theory and humanitarian law has been published in ASPASIA: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History, (2009), International Journal of Transitional Justice (2007), Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities (2007), Economy and Society (2005), Social and Legal Studies (2004),, Journal of Human Rights (2003), and Signs (2002). Kirsten has also co-edited with Vikki Bell a special issue of Social and Legal Studies (2004) on the theme of transitional justice. Kirsten’s current research develops her interest in justice and social relations, which she explored in her book, Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology (Routledge, 2004). In 2005, Kirsten was a visiting scholar in the Centre for the Study of Law and Society, Boalt Hall Law School, University of California, Berkeley. While a visiting scholar, Kirsten presented a section of her current research, ‘Models of Justice in the Jurisprudence of International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’ in the Centre’s seminar series.

Vikki Bell BA PhD
Professor of Sociology

Vikki's book Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law (Routledge, 1993) analysed the criminalisation of incest in England and Scotland, and some of the more controversial debates that have surrounded Michel Foucault's interventions concerning the history of sexuality. Her current research is centrally concerned with theories of identity and difference, particularly in relation to different aspects of legal regulation and the law's construction of the legal citizen-subject. Her recent study of the civic forum in Northern Ireland, a key civic participation mechanism set up under the Belfast Agreement has been published in Social and Legal Studies and Political Studies. She is the author of Feminist Imaginations: Genealogies in Feminist Theory (Sage, 1999) and a member of the editorial boards of Theory, Culture and Society and Social and Legal Studies.

Les Back BSc PhD
Professor of Sociology

Les Back's main research interests are on issues of hate crime and racism. In particular he has conducted courtroom ethnography, research into on-line Holocaust denial and an investigation into racist violence. His recent work on law and society include Out of whiteness: color, culture and politics (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and The Changing Face of Football: Racism and Multiculture in the English Game (Berg, 2001).

Mariam Fraser BA PhD
Senior Lecturer in Sociology

Mariam's research interests include feminist theories of embodiment; materiality and ontology; biology, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology. Recent publications include Identity without Selfhood: Simone de Beauvoir and Bisexuality, Cambridge University Press 1999, 'The Nature of Prozac,' History of the Human Sciences 2001 14(3): 57-85, and 'Visceral futures: bodies of feminist criticism,' Social Epistemology 2001 15(2): 91-111. Mariam has recently studied the development and production of the anti-depressant Prozac by way of an analysis of Fentress v. Shea (1994), a civil liability suit brought against Eli Lilly and Company following the Joseph Wesbecker murders in 1989. The project was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Ben Gidley BA MA PhD
Research Fellow

Ben Gidley is researching citizenship, belonging and community at a number of different levels. He has conducted several research projects on participatory democracy, community development and alternative forms of politics in South East London. He has researched the challenges of governance in "super-diverse" urban neighbourhoods for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, looking at neighbourhoods with high numbers of new migrants, including refugees and economic migrants. He is engaged in a number of longer term research projects looking at the British Jewish community and at its experience of forms of racism. He is interested in the way local sites and spaces of justice and injustice intersect with larger global and diasporic processes.

Monica Greco BA PhD
Senior Lecturer in Sociology

Major research interests are social theory, especially in relation to medicine, the 'body'; the 'psy' disciplines and the life sciences; concepts of health and disease; psychosomatics; sociology of subjectivity, personhood and identity; and problems of historicity especially with reference to the work of Michel Foucault. Her recent publications include Illness as a Work of Thought - A Foucauldian Perspective on Psychosomatics (Routledge, 1998). Monica's current research develops her interest in these areas in relationship to human rights, focussing upon the right to health.

David Hirsh BSc MA PhD
Lecturer in Sociology

David wrote Law against Genocide: cosmopolitan trials (GlassHouse 2004), which, by focusing on two trials from the ICTY, the trial of Andrei Sawoniuk for crimes committed during the Holocaust, and the David Irving libel case, draws some conclusions about the possible emergence of cosmopolitan law. This book was awarded the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Prize (£1000) for the best first sole authored book in sociology in March 2004.

He received a Rothschild/Hanadiv Foundation research grant of £25000 for a project to investigate the character and dynamics of anti-Zionism as a contemporary political movement and its relationship to antisemitism (January 2007 to August 2007). The central research output made possible by this funding was a major Working Paper published by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, entitled Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: Cosmopolitan Reflections. In 2006/7, David was a Research Fellow at Yale University. Hear him talk about the paper.

David is the founding editor of the Engage website, a resource for those working to understand and to oppose contemporary antisemitism and the Engage journal. He has also written on antisemitism on the Guardian website Comment Is Free, as well as in Dissent, Progress Magazine, Times Higher Education Supplement, The Jewish Chronicle, Haaretz, YnetNews.com, and The Jerusalem Post.

Scott Lash BSc Ma PhD
Professor of Sociology

Scott's research interests include social and cultural theory; information society; multimedia and urban studies He is the author of Sociology of Postmodernism (Routledge 1990) and Another Modernity, A Different Rationality (Blackwell, 1999) and the Critique of Information (Sage, 2000). He is co-author with John Urry of The End of Organized Capitalism (Polity, 1987), Economies of Signs and Space (1994). He is co-author, with Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, of Reflexive Modernization (Polity, 1994).

Celia Lury BA PhD
Professor of Sociology

Celia's research interests include sociology of culture and consumption; sociology of gender and women's studies and sociology of technology. Her publications include Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (Routledge, 1998), Consumer Culture (Polity, 1997) and Cultural Rights (Routledge, 1996). She recently published two books relating to issues of intellectual property and the law: The Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things (with Scott Lash, Polity, forthcoming) and Brands: The Logos of the Cultural Economy (Routledge).

Kate Nash BSc PhD
Reader in Sociology

Kate is currently interested in human rights, cultural politics and political culture and has recently published The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US and UK, Cambridge University Press 2009. Some of her recent research on human rights has appeared in articles in Constellations and Economy and Society. She also has wider interests in law and society, especially the relationship between social movements and citizenship rights. She is the author of Universal Difference: Feminism and the Liberal Undecidability of "Women" (Macmillan 1998) and Contemporary Political Sociology: globalization, politics and power (Blackwell 2000), and co-editor (with Alan Scott) of The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology (Blackwell 2001).

David Oswell BA MA PhD
Lecturer in Sociology

Research interests cut across cultural studies, sociology of science and technology, sociology of childhood and social theory. My research has considered the genealogical figuring of the 'child' in media and communications (radio, television and internet) institutions, technologies and practices (with a particular focus on questions about regulation and government). This work has been published in a range of journals such as Screen, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Convergence and in a book, Television, Childhood and the Home (Oxford University Press, 2002). Recent work has focused on internet child pornography in terms of the emergence of an ethics of virtual observation in the context of legislation, policing, media reporting and academic research (see 'When Images Matter', Information, Communication and Society) and on the construction of media and mediated events as complex material forms of organisation or multiplicities.

My book Culture Matters (Sage, 2005) develops cultural studies theory in the context of work on materiality, translation, multitude, empire, ethics, and multiplicity. My book The Sociology of Childhood (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2005) looks at children's agency and the history of childhood in the context of post-social bio-political governmentalities.

My postgraduate teaching reflects some of these interests but is also inflected by more general philosophical questions about generation, forms of life and technology (from Aristotle to La Mettrie to Serres, Deleuze and Latour

Nirmal Puwar BA MA PhD
Lecturer in Sociology

Nirmal Puwar's research is concerned with the embodied nature of citizenship and authority. She theorises relationship between bodies and space in Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place (2004, Berg). This involves a substantive analysis of institutions, including parliament, academia and the art world as well as national space, such as Trafalgar Square. In addition, she has explored the way in which the nation is both maintained through memory work as well as disrupted by the arrival of new bodies through collaborative visual and sound installations. Her work has also examined how the somatic nature of governance and leadership has also been problematised through the incorporation of the 'subaltern' in international global politics. She is on the editorial of the international journal Feminist Review and, has contributed to Special Issues on Labour Migration and Globalisation.

Bev Skeggs BA PhD PGCE
Professor of Sociology

Bev's research interests include class, cultural formations, feminist and poststructuralist theory, Pierre Bourdieu and Marx, sexuality, space and violence. Bev is interested in the relationship between the most intimate and the most structural, between who we think we are and global capitalism and the processes by which we become (the doing of being). Throughout all Bev's books is a central concern with power, with who has value, with who is seen to be worthy and unworthy and with how groups are positioned and position themselves in relation to the social categories available to them. In Sexuality and the Politics of Violence, co-written with Les Moran, Paul Tyrer and Karen Corteen, Routledge, 2003, she shows how judgements about culture have become pertinent to how people are assessed through law and how they can make justice claims. The book was produced as part of the ESRC funded Violence, Sexuality and Space project.