Dr Georgie Wemyss

Georgie’s first book The Invisible Empire: white discourse, tolerance and belonging (Ashgate, 2009) was an ethnographic investigation, focused on East London’s regenerating docklands, into the repetitive burying of British Empire histories of violence in local and national political and media narratives.

Over the past decade, she moved on to researching new conceptual approaches to analysing borders and bordering initially funded by the EUBorderscapes research project (2012-2016). Based on this work, Georgie and co-authors were awarded the annual prize for excellence and innovation by the journal Sociology for the paper Everyday Bordering, Belonging and the Reorientation of British Immigration Legislation - Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss, Kathryn Cassidy, 2018 (sagepub.com). The same team also published the book Bordering (Polity, 2019). Georgie researched and produced the film Everyday Borders (2015, Director Orson Nava) as a learning resource.

Since 2020 she has returned to the docks researching colonial histories of present-day bordering regimes, see for example the article: Frontiers | Bordering seafarers at sea and onshore (frontiersin.org). She worked with the Thames Festival Trust in researching and presenting the film London’s Lost Village: Britain’s Invisible Empire (2023) Thames Festival Trust | London's Lost Village | Thames Festival Trust (scroll down to 7th film).

In parallel Georgie has been working with community projects developing and delivering Heritage Lottery-funded projects that excavate and re-interpret colonial histories with local links for example organising tours centred on coloniality and the East India Docks.

Georgie is a co-investigator on the research project Statues and Memories of Empire in post-imperial France and Britain Cast in Stone – Statues and Memories of Empire in France and Britain (exeter.ac.uk)