Refugee Research Centre

Members (in alphabetical order)

Prof Molly Andrews

Professor of Sociology at UEL. Her research explores the implicit political world views which individuals impart through the stories they tell about their lives, as well the wider social and political context which makes some stories more ‘tell-able’ than others. Her books include: Doing Narrative Research (ed) (2008), Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (2007) and Considering Counter-Narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense (2004). She is also Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research (CNR) at UEL.

Prof Haim Bresheeth

Professor Haim Bresheeth is a filmmaker, photographer and film studies scholar. He has written on the Israel/Palestine conflict and worked with Palestinian refugees. His books include the best-selling Introduction to the Holocaust. His edited volumes include The Gulf War and the New World Order, (with Nira Yuval-Davis) published in 1992 by Zed Books, Cinema and Memory: Dangerous Liaisons, Co-edited with Zand, S and Zimmerman, M, Jerusalem, Zalman Shazar Centre (Hebrew) 2004, and a special double-issue of Third Text (September, 2006), on Palestinian and Israeli art, photography, architecture and cinema (co-edited with Haifa Hammami). He is also Director of Matric East Research Lab (MERL), which focuses on digital arts and cybercultures.

Babak Davarpanah

An international consultant who has worked for the World Bank, UNDP and other agencies in the Middle East, Central Asia and China, as well as communities in London Docklands and Sheffield. As an economist and urban and regional planner he has evaluated the socio/economic impact of local environmental initiatives and has developed national urban upgrading programmes. His prime focus is to help develop sustainable local economic development strategies through participatory planning and partnership, with particular interest in mainstreaming cross-cutting issues such as gender, minority rights and information and communication technologies.

Paul V Dudman

Has been responsible for the Refugee Archive at UEL since November 2002. Paul is a member of professional bodies including the Society of Archivists, the international Council on Archives, the British Records Association and CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

Dr Narmala Halstead

Has carried out long-term anthropological fieldwork on East Indians and other groups in Guyana and on migrants in New York. Her research began with an interest in exploring the connections and divergences between the local and the global in terms of people’s lived experiences. She has looked at cultural performativity and considered issues of status, identity and forms of socio-political violence. Her research sites included ‘wedding houses’, ‘chutney’ music sessions, interactions between people and state-like institutions, and cafes outside law courts among others. She has also carried out research at airports, on Caribbean migrants in London and on Portuguese migrants in Wales.

Syd Jeffers

Senior Lecturer in Sociology at UEL. His research interests include race, public policy and social theory. Current research includes ‘The changing politics of race and ethnicity’ and ‘Tocqueville on democracy and empire’.

Erene Kaptani

Erene is a registered Dramatherapist , Performer and Researcher and has been working with Studio Upstairs since 2008. Erene wrote and performed in ‘Suspended Lives’ a play based on a three year ESRC funded research with refugee groups. She uses theatre to question constructions of identities, institutional and public communications as well as creating spaces/events for debate and interaction among different audiences.

Dr Roshini Kempadoo

Photographer, media artist and lecturer. Her research, multimedia and photographic projects combine factual and fictional re-imaginings of contemporary experiences with history and memory. Having worked as a social documentary photographer for the Format Women’s Picture Agency, her recent work as a digital image artist includes photographs and screen-based interactive art installations that fictionalise Caribbean archive material, objects and spaces. They combine sound, animations and interactive use of objects to introduce characters that once may have existed, evoking hidden and untold narratives. She is represented by Autograph ABP.

Prof Yosefa Loshitzky

Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Yosefa Loshitzky is the author of The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (1995), Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001), Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema (2010), the editor of Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List (1997) and a guest editor of a special issue of Third Text on “Fortress Europe: Migration, Culture, Representation” (2006). She has been a Visiting Research Fellow at The Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, The Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA, The Yitzhak Rabin Centre for Israel Studies, The Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, The French CNRS, and The Italian CNR. From 2004–5 she was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at University College London (UCL).

Prof Philip Marfleet

A trustee and member of the Council for British Research in the Levant, a division of the British Council, Phil Marfleet has worked in the fields of international migration, refugee studies and development studies. His books include Migration, Theory and Society (forthcoming 2011), Egypt: the moment of change (ed) (2009), Museums, the Media and Refugees: Stories of Crisis, Control and Compassion with Goodnow, K & Lohman J (2008) and Refugees in a Global Era (2006).

Prof Peter G Morey

Peter Morey is a Reader in English at UEL, teaching and researching mainly in the areas of 20th–21st century literature with a particular interest in postcolonial literature and theory, especially pertaining to South Asia and its diasporas. He has recently been a co-ordinator of an AHRC and ESRC research project on ‘Reframing Muslims’. He taught at Sussex, Leeds and Worcester before arriving at UEL in 1998. Although he mainly focuses on literature, his work is informed by adjacent disciplines such as cultural and media studies and their attendant theories. In particular he is interested in matters of narrative and power, and his research broadly addresses the question of how narrative and representational forms are complicit with (and how they contest and problematise) established power relations.

Dr John Nassari

Director of the Refugee Studies MA at UEL. He is an artist and academic. He has exhibited practice-based research nationally and internationally and is the director of PhotoInsight, an online art and theory website dedicated to issues in forced migration. John works on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary methodologies in refugee studies, and has published widely on refugee representation, identity, memory and narrative.21

Prof Mica Nava

Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at UEL, Mica Nava's publications include Gender and Generation (1984); Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism (1992); Modern Times: A Century of English Modernity (1996); Buy This Book (1997) and Visceral Cosmopolitanism (2007). Since the 1980s her work has been widely cited and reprinted and has contributed to the expansion of cultural studies in UK and abroad. She is also a member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research (CCSR) at UEL. She has been invited to give keynote conference papers and/or special lectures on her research in Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Holland, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the United States as well as at universities and other venues throughout Britain.

Dr Marta Rabikowska

Senior Lecturer in Media and Advertising at UEL and a documentary film maker. Her film Belonging, Consumption and Place received the first Jury Award by the Association of Consumer Research at the University of Milan 2007 and again in San Francisco 2008. She is a guest editor for Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009) and a reviewer for the International Journal of Learning, Social Identities, and the ACR Film Festival. Her research involves visual methods, especially videography, which she applies to gain an embodied and located view of the objects of her study mainly consumption, community, migration, city and ethnicity. She is interested in creative pedagogy and online teaching and learning. Her latest research funded, by the Leverhulme Charity Trust with Queen Mary, University of London is to result in a documentary film on health practices among Polish, Nigerian and Indian communities in south east London.

Dr Sibel Safi

Dr. Sibel Safi (LLB, MA, LLM, PhD) is a senior research fellow in the field of International Law, Human Rights Law and Refugee Law. She has an in-depth knowledge and understanding of international asylum and immigration issues gained through her doctoral research (Ph.D), LLM, LLB and MA degrees. She has numerous journal articles and focuses on gender related persecution, honour killings in Refugee Law, cultural identity of immigrant Turks, human rights of women and multiculturalism, conceptualizing honour killings in the migration context, gender-related persecution in immigrant culture and granting refugee status. She was involved in extensive teaching in European Union law lectures at the Academy of Sciences of Economy and author of the ‘Evaluation of Human Rights; Turkey case’, 2010. She is recently working on the research project of ‘gender-related persecution in national asylum legislations and policies at the Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London  and is working as an academic coordinator at the London Centre for Social Studies. She speaks fluent English, Romanian, and Turkish.

Dr Ashwani Sharma

Postgraduate programmes co-ordinator in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UEL and Co-director of Centre for Cultural Studies Research (CCSR). He is Programme Leader for MA Media Studies and MA Global Media. He is the co-editor of Darkmatter – a new independent online journal, and Tabula Rasa – the subject of postcolonial thought. He is the co-editor of Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (1996). He is currently working on a collection of essays: Global Media Culture post 9/11; and British Asian popular culture.

Eyal Sivan

Film-maker, producer and essayist. He has directed more than ten feature-length documentaries about political issues and produced many others. He lectures about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, political film-making and issues concerning political crime, instrumentalisation of genocide and its representation, and the political use of memory in Israel. Among the prizes he has been awarded are the ‘Cinéma du Réel Prize’ at the Centre Pompidou in Paris for his first film Aqabat Jaber, Passing Through about displaced Palestinian populations; the Rome Prize from the French Ministry of Culture. the Adolf Grimm Gold prize in Germany for his work The Specialist about the Eichmann case.

Dr Michael Skey

Researches in the areas of national identity and globalisation, discourse theory, media and everyday life. He has published work on mass rituals, theories of nationalism and cosmopolitan identities and is currently preparing a monograph National Belonging and Everyday Life. Future work will look to explore issues around identity and security, media and diasporic identities and sports reporting.

Prof Corinne Squire

Professor of Social Sciences and Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research at UEL. Her most recent publications are HIV in South Africa: Talking about the Big Thing (2007), HIV Technologies in International Perspective (edited with Mark Davis) and Doing Narrative Research (edited with Molly Andrews and Maria Tamboukou). Her research interests are in HIV and citizenship, narrative theory and methods, and popular cultures and subjectivities.

Dr Abel Ugba

Senior Lecturer in Journalism at UEL. He has worked as a reporter, correspondent and subeditor in newspapers in Nigeria, Germany and Ireland. In 2000, Dr Ugba and Chinedu Onyejelem established Metro Eireann, Ireland’s most popular multicultural newspaper. He is on the editorial boards of Translocation and of EJN News. He is also the current President of the Exiled Journalists’ Network (EJN).

Profr Nira Yuval-Davis

Director of CMRB. She has been the President of the Research Committee 05 (on Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations) of the International Sociological Association, a member of the Sociology sub-panel of the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) of 2008 and is an editor of the book series The Politics of Intersectionality (Palgrave Macmillan). She is a founding member of the international research network of Women In Militarised Conflict Zones and of Women Against Fundamentalism and has served as a consultant to international organisations such as Amnesty International, the UNDP and the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. Among her written and edited books are Woman – Nation – State (1989); Racialized Boundaries (1992); Unsettling Settler Societies (1995); Gender and Nation (1997); Women, Citizenship & Difference (1999); Warning Signs of Fundamentalisms (2004) ; and The Situated Politics of Belonging (2006).

 

PhD Students & Post-doctoral Researchers

 

Ali Ali

Thesis title: Choice and constraint: narratives of Iraqi refugees in Jordan

Celine Cantat

Thesis title: Politics of exclusion and the making of migrant identities in Europe

Frances Cetti

Thesis title: Terror and the figure of the refugee

Dr Mastoureh Fathi

Thesis title: Classed Pathways: Narratives of Iranian Women Migrants

Jamie Hakim

Thesis title: Affect and Cultural Change: The Rise of Popular Zionism in the British Jewish Community after the 'Six Day War' (1967)

Rumana Hashem

Thesis title: Gender and armed conflict: the case of Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh

Helen Margaret Leadbitter

Thesis title: Meeting the health care and support needs of refugee and asylum seeking families with particular reference to the impact of illness and disability on the young people within the family unit

Lynn Mhlanga

Thesis title: Presumption of guilt: criminalisation and marginalisation of migrant communities in the global war on terror

Nicola Samson

Thesis title: Narratives of Belonging: Life Histories of Women in East London post Second World War

Dayjour Sefre

Thesis title: Refugee experiences in education: A comparative study of Iranian and Afghani pupils in London’s secondary schools.

Mary Sutton

Thesis title: From solidarity to sanctuary: refugees’ experiences with church communities

Dr Helen Taylor

Thesis title: Landscapes of Belonging: the Meaning of Home for Cypriot Refugees in London

Steve Thorpe

Thesis title: Inter-generational Dynamics in Protracted Urban Exile: Southern Sudanese Refugees in Cairo

Tahir Zaman

Thesis title: The Noble Sanctuary: Islamic traditions and Iraqi refugees in Syria

Dr Diana Yeh

Thesis title: Beyond (British) – Chineseness: The Politics and Poetics of Art and Migration in Multi-ethnic Contexts

 

 

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© 2008