Members
Aécio Amaral lectures in Sociology at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil, is a member of the editorial team of the Portuguese journal Nada and is an associate researcher in InC - Research Group in Continental Philosophy, based in Goldsmiths College. He is currently writing up his PhD at the Centre for Cultural Studies in Goldsmiths; his doctoral research (sponsored by CNPq, Brasil) is a study of the Post-Heideggerian approach to technoscience within post-1968 critical theory. He is co-editor of Inclusão social, identidade e diferença: perspectivas pós-estruturalistas de análise social (São Paulo, Annablume 2006). Current projects include Recombinant Genetics and Biosafety Law.
Claire Blencowe is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, where she organises activities in the Authority & Political Technologies group. She was PI on the ARN's Participatory Practice and Immanent Authority projects. Claire has research interests in political subjectivity, biopolitics, vitalism, the discursive production of inequality, authority and new materialism. She is also interested in collaborative modes of thinking, writing and working. Current projects include Christianity & Citizenship in Sub-Saharan Africa and Critical Theories and Histories of the Politics of Life. Recent publications include Biopolitical Experience: Foucault, Power & Positive Critique (Palgrave).
Patrick Bresnihan is Assistant Professor in Environmental Geography in Trinity College Dublin. His work draws from political ecology, science and technology studies, feminist theory and anthropology. His current research interests are the commons, environmental infrastructures and the financialization of nature. His first book, Transforming the Fisheries. Neoliberalism, Nature & the Commons was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2016. He also participates in the Provisional University, an activist-research project based in Dublin.
Julian Brigstocke teaches Human Geography at Cardiff University. His research interests focus on critical theory and the intersections of cultural, social, and political geography. He focuses on authority, cities, materiality, and the politics of aesthetics. Current projects include affective atmospheres of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro; the geopolitics of sand in colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong; His monograph The Life of the City was published in 2014 and is now out in paperback. He is currently completing a monograph exploring the aesthetics and politics of authority.
Leila Dawney is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Exeter. A social theorist and cultural geographer, her research focuses on the politics of affect and experience, on classical and emergent thinking on authority and on forms of experience in late capitalist life, contributing to ongoing debates on power, authority, affect and the commons. Her most recent research has focused on the relationship between deindustrialisation and modes of endurance and temporality through fieldwork in a former nuclear town in Lithuania, and focuses on emergent forms of social and collective life in the wake of deindustrialisation and urban decline.
Sam Kirwan is a Lecturer in Policy Studies. He is interested in practices, policies and experiences at the intersection of debt and welfare; where indebted lives are shaped by benefits systems, and where social security is re-framed as a debtor/creditor relationship. He is currently working on a Leverhulme project entitled 'A Sociology of Everyday Indebtedness'. The project investigates how households deal with and experience different debts, with a particular focus upon: the growing problem of 'priority' debts, principally Council Tax and rent arrears; understandings of the Debt Relief Order and other insolvency measures; how debt shapes familial and social relations; changes in the temporal structures of debt; and the criminalisation of debt.
Naomi Millner is a socio-environmental geographer who works on the knowledge politics surrounding access to, and management of environmental resources. The work I do brings a “people perspective” into food and forest sustainability issues, as well as attending to the importance of "more-than-human" relationships to social justice and equality. The specific projects I am involved in - at the moment in Colombia, Guatemala, and India - bring fresh understandings to how and why environmental conflict occurs, and, how long-term collective action for the restoration of soils and forests can be achieved.
This means documenting the expertise and know-how that have long sustained soils, seeds and forests through participatory workshops, ethnographies and oral histories, and tracing broader histories of collective action. Through my research, issues of social conflict, citizenship and displacement are shown to be central to the negotiation of any "sustainable" futures. I also explore cultural and theoretical dimensions of witnessing, testimony, (ecological) memory to explore how knowledge about the environment is shaped by "figures" of identification, and through a politics of aesthetics. Contact Naomi.
Tehseen Noorani is an honorary research fellow in Anthropology at Durham University in the UK. His research investigates the social, political and epistemic nature of extreme experiences, produced through drugs, illness and trauma, and how such experiences are taken up in science and politics. He draws on sociology, anthropology, political theory and science and technology studies. Tehseen has published on experiential forms of knowledge and expertise, medicalization, mutual aid practices and the return of psychedelic research and therapy. Currently, Tehseen is completing a monograph based on an ethnography at the intersections of psychedelia and madness, and is organizing a conference for early 2021 on the same topics. Contact Tehseen.