Staff Profile
Dr Angharad Closs Stephens
Contact (email at a.c.stephens@durham.ac.uk)
Biography
Angharad studied for her PhD in Politics and International Relations with Professor R.B.J. Walker at Keele University and completed her thesis in 2007. She holds a Masters degree in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics and a BSc in Political Studies from the Department of International Politics in Aberystwyth.
Research
In my research I engage in reformulating ideas of community, drawing on critical theoretical approaches to time, space and identity that are situated around different imaginings of the city.
This work has led to a series of engagements with the rhetoric of community and 'imaginary geographies' deployed as part of the War on Terror. In '7 Million Londoners, One London' (2007), I compared the way in which national and cosmopolitan ideas of community that circulated following the 2005 London bombings operated the same logic. This article was reproduced as part of the Urbanitats collection published by the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, called Architectures of Fear. It also appears alongside a number of critical interventions offered as alternative responses to the London bombings of 2005, collected in a book I co-edited with Nick Vaughan-Williams, Terrorism and the Politics of Response (2008).
A further research article, 'Beyond the Imaginary Geographies of the War on Terror' is focused around a reading of the bestselling novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and is forthcoming in Environment and Planning D; Society and Space. It argues that this novel emerges as a critical intervention that works in tandem with the imaginary geographies of the War on Terror despite the way it was marketed as showing 'the other side of the story'. The paper offers a critique of the liberal imaginary that underpins this novel and the ongoing capacity of this imaginary to steer our understandings of world politics.
In another article called 'Citizenship without Community: Time, Design and the City' published in Citizenship Studies, I suggest some alternative ways for thinking the possibility of community. The article offers a study of sites of memory drawn largely from the city of Berlin, and a tradition of writing the city as a splintered social space to explore ideas of community that refuse the principle of commonality. In May 2010, I co-organised a workshop on the theme of 'Citizenship without Community' at the British Library with Dr Vicki Squire, which included papers by Professors Étienne Balibar, Engin Isin, Joe Painter and Cindy Weber (the event was co-sponsored by the ENACT project and CCIG at the Open University and the Poststructural Politics Working Group). You can listen to the proceedings here. The papers will be published as part of a special issue in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
I am currently working on a research monograph provisionally titled Persistent Nationalisms: from Imagined Communities to Urban Assemblages. This is a book about the difficulties of thinking about political emancipation and resistance in ways that refuse the politics of nationalism. Drawing on the works of feminist, postcolonial and poststructural theorists, including Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Luc Nancy, the book argues that the task of thinking our way out of nationalist politics is also a challenge of resisting straightforward and progressive ideas of time that set limits on our political imaginations.
Research Networks
With Martin Coward, I co-convene the British International Studies Association Poststructural Politics Working Group. The group currently has over 200 members, and supports conferences and workshops that seek to engage with the political from a critical perspective. If you would like to be added to the group's mailing list, please write to bisa.ppwg@gmail.com
I'm also part of an inter-disciplinary working group drawn from four departments across Durham University, working on the theme 'Conceptualizing the Future', supported by the Institute of Advanced Study.
Member of editorial board
Planet: The Welsh Internationalist
Teaching
For the 2010-2011 academic year, I will be convening the following courses:
Political Geography (Level 2)
Urban Change in Europe (Level 3, including 7-day fieldtrip to the city of Berlin)
Politics/Space: Drawing Lines, Writing the World (Level 3, a new course for 2010)
I will also be part of the teaching team for the following courses:
Hazard and Risk; Philosophy and Theory in Contemporary Human Geography; Social Research in Geography.
Research Groups
Publications
Books: edited
- Closs Stephens, A & Vaughan-Williams, N Terrorism and the Politics of Response. London and New York: Routledge; 2008. (Additional information)
Books: sections
- Closs Stephens, A & Vaughan-Williams, N Introduction: London, Time, Terror. In: Closs Stephens, A & Vaughan-Williams, N Terrorism and the Politics of Response. London and New York: Routledge; 2009:1-15. (Additional information) (View publication online)
- Closs Stephens, A Walter Benjamin. In: Edkins, Jenny & Vaughan-Williams, Nick Critical Theorists and International Relations. London and New York: Routledge; 2009:77-88. (Additional information) (View publication online)
- Closs Stephens, A Seven Million Londoners, One London: National and Urban Ideas of Community in the Aftermath of the 7 July 2005 Bombings in London. In: Architectures of Fear. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona; 2008:43-64. (Additional information) (View publication online)
Journal papers: academic
- Closs Stephens, A Citizenship without community: time, design and the city. Citizenship Studies. 2010;14:31-46. (Additional information) (View publication online)
- Closs Stephens, A Weighing heavily in-between. Review of International Studies. 2009;35:859-870. (Additional information)
- Closs Stephens, A Seven million Londoners, one London: National and urban ideas of community in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. Alternatives. 2007;32:155-176. (Additional information) (View publication online)
- Closs Stephens, A Democratising Local Government in Wales. Contemporary Wales. 2004;16:133-149.