Director of the Centre for Art and Politics
Senior Lecturer in Collective Violence
My research explores the psychological processes associated with collective and individual identity formation particularly in the context of conflict and collective violence. I am interested in how anxiety functions as a political motivator, and how perceptions of material change can prompt political action and collective violence. I have examined such phenomena in the contexts of expressions of anti-Semitism in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe, the wars of the Former Yugoslavia, and in the conflicts of the Northern Caucasus. My present research projects analyze the processes of identity formation in immigrant communities in Western Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom. My research explores the relationship between a changing ethnic polity and perceptions of the state and community membership. I ask the questions of how collectivities form a sense of identity through exclusion, and how new arrivals are to attach to majority or establish identity forms, or indeed whether they can.
Generally in my research I explore the confluences of conflict, collective violence, terrorism, psychology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, cultural studies, identity formation, and political economy.