Raising our International Profile

Communicative Citizenship – Latin American perspectives
One of our doctoral students, Camilo Tamayo Gomez, is publishing a paper in the well-renowned journal “Signo y Pensamiento" about his  preliminary approach to doctoral research, this is forthcoming but available now on  http://goo.gl/bh4cw
 The paper, titled ‘Communicative Citizenship: Preliminary approaches’, argues that in order to understand the relationship between communication, citizenship and rights it is necessary to analyse three fields separately: the political communication field, the social communication field and the cultural communication field.

Camilo’s research develops a concept of communicative citizenship, a model and methodological tools to create a comprehensive and integrative approach to the relationship between communication, citizenship and rights, and overcome this gap. The project includes the analysis of socio communicative regimes in an armed conflict context (Colombia), a multicultural context focusing on migrants' political action (United Kingdom), and a society where Governmental control affects communicative and political rights (Italy). To describe, analyse and understand how these conditions affect the human rights field and how it is possible to claim for justice, equality and freedom from a communicative perspective, are the final aims of this research. The paper presents the theoretical frame of the doctoral research "Communicative citizenship, another dimension of rights".  Camilo is supported by a University of Huddersfield bursary. 

Dr Jo Woodiwiss presented a paper titled ‘(Re)constructing / negotiating a sexual self ‘ at the Biannual Irish Sexuality Studies conference, Dublin, in March 2012. This paper looked at the use of sexual scripts and explored the problems of prescribing a particular sexual self. In a (western) world increasingly informed by therapeutic discourses, childhood is constructed as a time of sexual innocence, at the same time as adult women are told they can and should, (and have the right to) live better, more fulfilling, and satisfying sexual lives. This has helped to construct as problematic women who ‘deviate’ from what (drawing on Rich 1980) Dr Woodiwiss has called ‘compulsory sexuality’, thereby putting pressure on all women to construct a (particular) active sexual self. Those who are unable/unwilling to reconstruct such a sexual self are encouraged to see this as problematic and seek both cause and solution in their damaged psychologies. One such cause is said to be childhood sexual abuse and this paper explores women’s engagement with a body of literature that encourages them to not only identify themselves as victims of CSA but to use the idea of an active sexual self as a measure of health, well-being and ultimately womanhood. In critiquing this literature Dr Woodiwiss also explored how it can be used to create different sexual selves, albeit ones perceived to be ‘damaged’. The paper relates to material published in Dr Woodiwiss’ book Contesting Stories of Childhood Sexual Abuse which has recently been favourably reviewed http://sex.sagepub.com/content/14/4/496.citation

Dr Andrew Mycock and Professor Jim McAuley have been invited by colleagues at the Australian National University in Canberra to contribute to a special symposium, ‘The Politics of the Past: Great War Commemoration in International Perspective’ (April 2012). Both presented papers as this groundbreaking event which sought to develop comparative research as the centenary of the commencement of the First World War approaches. They were kindly invited by Dr Ben Wellings, who has collaborated on various projects with CRISS members. Their papers discussed the politics of history and historiography, memory cultures, and public acts of remembrance in the UK and Ireland within the context of the centenary of World War One. Contributors to the symposium also attended the ANZAC Day Dawn Service in Canberra where Australians and others across the Commonwealth commemorate the moment when Australian and New Zealand troops went ashore at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles before attending a reception as a guest of French Ambassador. It is hoped that this important event will strengthen research networks and facilitate exciting new avenues of research.

Dr Andrew Mycock has had a new article published in the prestigious journal, National Identities, entitled ‘SNP, identity and citizenship: Re-imagining state and nation’. The article critically assesses claims by the Scottish National Party (SNP) that Scottish nationalism is ‘wholly civic’. He argues that in reality the SNP overlook ethnic dynamics of Scottish nationalism and also seek to establish ‘memory gaps’ with regards to the former British Empire and also Northern Ireland. He has drawn on this article in working with the influential think-tank, British Future, on a project assessing how Scottishness is understood and articulated.

Professor Jeff Hearn has published widely over the past year, including an edited book: Elisabetta Ruspini, Jeff Hearn, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle (eds.) Men and Masculinities around the World: Transforming Men's Practices, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2011 and a number of articles and book chapters such as:

• ’Hegemonic masculinity and beyond: 40 years of research in Sweden’, with M. Nordberg, K. Andersson, D. Balkmar, L. Gottzén, R. Klinth, K. Pringle, and L. Sandberg, Men and Masculinities, Vol. 15(1), 2012, pp. 31-55.
• ’Men, managers, fathers and home-work relations: National context, organisational policies, and individual lives’, with C. Niemistö, in P. McDonald and E. Jeanes (eds.) Men's Wage and Family Work, Routledge, London, 2012, pp. 95-113.

In February this year Jeff gave a public lecture on ‘The political category of “men” in activism, policy and theorising’, at London School of Economics Gender Institute, UK.

Dr Surya Monro, with Professor Diane Richardson from the University of Newcastle, are publishing a major new book on sexuality and equality, with prestigious publishers Palgrave MacMillan. The book provides a cutting edge examination of key issues concerning sexuality and citizenship, democracy, organisational change, and intersectionality. Drawing on original research in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the book also uses material from South Africa, Nepal and the USA, and it has been recognised as internationally important. The book will be available in hard copy and paperback from the end of March.

War and Peace? - After intensive grassroots research which included interviews with scores of ex-paramilitaries in Ulster, a book co-authored by Professor Jim McAuley and Dr Catherine McGlynn of the University of Huddersfield has been awarded a prestigious prize and hailed a “triumph”, with major implications for the treatment of political prisoners in conflicts all over the globe. The award judges described the book as “the most important work undertaken on the roles of former paramilitary prisoners in developing the Northern Ireland peace process”. And the authors were praised for the rigour of their research for the book, entitled Abandoning Historical Conflict? Former political prisoners and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.  Judges for the Brian Farrell Prize, awarded by the Political Studies Association of Ireland, stated that Prof McAuley and Dr McGlynn, plus their co-authors Professor Jonathan Tonge  of the University of Liverpool and Dr Peter Shirlow, of Queen’s University, Belfast, “strayed far from their university comfort zones, travelling across Northern Ireland and even interviewing the last remaining Provisional IRA prisoners in the Irish Republic in their quest to discover more about how peace took hold and why”. The book was the product of research funded to the tune of £80,000 by the Leverhulme Trust.

Dr Peter Woodcock has recently become the UK coordinator of CiCe (Children’s Identity and Citizenship in Europe) is an Erasmus Academic Network) and Dr Chris Gifford has been elected as an executive of the Cicea (the Children’s Identity and Citizenship European Association). CiCe and CiCea are supported by the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme (approximately 600,000 Euros for this fifth round of funding). CiCe is a network of about 100 higher education institutions, from 30 countries in Europe. Members share an interest in the way in which children and young people learn about citizenship in the European context, and how they construct their identities. The courses we they teach in our universities and colleges, and the research that they undertake, are concerned with the way that individuals, from birth to late teens, understand and learn about social, political and economic affairs. For more information see http://cice.londonmet.ac.uk and http://www.cicea.eu/

Dr Tracey Yeadon-Lee recently presented two papers at two International conferences. The first paper, co-authored with Dr Helen Gavin, was presented at the 1st Global Conference: Queer Sexualities, in Warsaw, Poland in May 2011. The paper, 'Is Nonce the new Queer?', which examines how and why male homosexuality and paedophilia are often conflated within the public imagination, stimulated much discussion at the conference and was successful in contributing to the development of new ideas concerning potential new directions for queer theories and research. The paper will be published in Queer Sexualities, ID-net press Oxford, UK in August 2011.

Tracey's second paper was presented at the 6th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, University of New Orleans, USA. Her presentation, 'Bringing in the Customers: Regulation, Discretion and Customer Service Narratives in an Upmarket Hair Salon', was based in the research she has been carrying out in UK Hair salons. The paper, which examines the interplay between organisational structures, managerial regulation and the agency of stylists was particularly well received, stimulating useful discussion about the need to consider more 'productive' aspects of power and control within work organisations. The paper is due to be published in The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, in August, 2011.

Professor Jeff Hearn has continued to present widely at a range of international conferences and events. His keynotes and papers include:

Plenary keynote, ’Equality, growth, sustainability: Adding some more missing ingredients to the mixture’, Equality, Growth, Sustainability: Do They Mix?” International Conference, Linköping University, November 2010

Plenary ’”In-between feminism, men and violence”: Some ’things’ that have become important in working against violences’, Women against Violence against Women International Conference, Zagreb, Croatia, December 2010.

‘Interrogating gender: thinking on men and gender relations’, Law, Gender, Identity, Finnish Annual Legal Graduate School, Lammi, Finland, March, 2011.

‘Thinking on men, masculinities and violences - personally, bodily, politically, societally, transnationally, theoretically’, Intergender/Swedish Institute doctoral course on Contextualising Gendered Violence:  Interconnections of Violence, Nation and Masculinity, Linköping (and Istanbul), June, 2011.

‘Gendering Excellence in Academia, Gender Studies, Science and Technology: Critical Reflections and Critical Actions’, Women's Worlds Conference, Ottawa, Canada. July 2011.

‘Men/Nation: The nation and citizenship from methodological nationalism to transpatriarchies’, Why is there no Happiness in the East? The Making of European Gender Studies Conference. Masculinity and Nationhood Panel, September, 2011.

Dr Alex Smith gives Presidential Address

Book Launch at the Pacific Sociological Association

Choice and Gender in Antenatal Care

Informing Equalities and Human Rights Work across Europe

The Simpsons meet Academia