Graduate Research
With 1600 graduate students, our members research reaches into every field. Here is a sample of the research interests of our masters and PhD students
Gilberto Algar-Faria, MSc Defence, Development & Diplomacy
Although my primary research interest relates to critical perspectives in peace and conflict within the field of Security Studies, I also enjoy more traditional work within the field of International Relations. For example, my Masters dissertation - which is a study of North Korea's foreign policy - falls within this category. Specifically, my dissertation is a comparative study of North Korea's foreign policy goals during its first leadership transition in 1994 (when the founding leader Kim Il-sung passed away), and its second transition which has been underway in earnest since Kim Jong-il died in December 2011. Given how recent this leadership transition is, and that power is now vested with the largely unknown Kim Jong-un, this is a highly relevant topic within both academic and policy circles.
David Divine, PhD School of Applied Social Sciences
My doctoral research is an exploration of the impact on one's life course of having spent a significant period as a child in an orphanage. The research involves a participatory, Auto (biographical), ethnographic narrative approach, with myself as an 'insider,' a former resident of an orphanage, in the position of researcher, ally and participant, using a poststructuralist approach to life story research. Semi structured in depth interviews took place with 20-25 former residents of one particular orphanage which was in operation for 92 years between 1875 and 1967. The ages of the participants ranged from 59-83. An average of eight years was spent in the orphanage. I am deeply concerned about the voices of those who have not had the opportunity or been denied the right to have such an opportunity, to air their stories as they interpret them, about their experiences, thoughts and feelings concerning their lives. The research aims to fill a gap in the literature and our knowledge about about what happened in such institutions and how the experience of living in them affected their lives subsequently. Insights for policy and practice with regard to 'Looked After' children will be outlined.
Lizzie Richardson, PhD Geography - Circulation and Settling: Performing Postcolonial Stories in Bristol
My PhD research takes a number of contemporary practices of storytelling in the city of Bristol in the UK to explore the relationship between creativity, memory and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic, interview and archival material on theatre, spoken word and carnival, the project broadly asks who can take part in performance and what enables or disables participation. It aims to examine the ways in which contemporary creative practices of narration take up, underplay or avoid Bristol's past. As a significant node in the eighteenth century slave trade and later a site of settlement for post-war migration from the West Indies, attempts to negotiate Bristol's ruptured and often disowned history speak to wider questions of the place of the past in any conception of British national identity. My suggestion is that creative practices which draw upon but rework such pasts offer one way of both understanding and constructing a more progressive contemporary belonging. Such a cultural politics involves rescuing the notion of creativity from the current (urban) neoliberal agenda in order to relocate it in a variety of vernacular practices that occur for more than economic reasons.
Boya Wang, PhD Economics
Deriving from my experiences as an economic journalist for Neue Zürcher Zeitung (New Zurich Times), my research investigates how the political-economic institutions are shaping the trajectory of corporate governance development in the biggest transitional economy, China. My research concerns itself with the political-economic dynamics during transformation of corporate governance institutions. I seek to understand and explore the processes of how various societal actors, including policymakers and corporate executives, response to the political constraints and economic impetus given China’s unique institutional background.
My research involves conducting a mixed-method approach by which the dynamics of corporate governance will be explored from the perspectives of both decision makers and market participants. On the one hand, eeconometric regressions are applied to explore the correlation between the stock returns and firms’ corporate governance features and thus examine how overseas investors perceive the governance practices in Chinese companies. On the other hand, through considering the inner perceptions, attitudes, and feelings of the “local strategizers”, the subsequent case studies look at issues of corporate governance that requires more in-depth understandings of the social-economic context of China. This includes the de regulation of business activities, entrenched interest group politics, and the changing role of the party-state.
Misha Bordoloi Singh, MA Museum & Artefact Studies
Dark Tourism in the Andaman Islands
Places of death, suffering and tragedy have long attracted visitors, but it is only recently that there has been a move towards trying to understand what draws people to these places. My research is aimed at determining the key factors that motivate ‘dark tourists’, and is based in the Cellular Jail, an island prison that was built under British colonial rule in India. Cellular Jail is infamous as a place of suffering and torture and death, but as a prison for ‘freedom fighters’ is also a great source of national pride. I use semi-structured interviews with visitors and participant observation to better understand what brought them there, and how important a motivating force death really is.
Alice Panepinto, PhD Law - Transitional Justice in Islamic Settings
As a PhD candidate at Durham Law School I have embarked on a fascinating research project on ‘Transitional Justice in Islamic Settings’ which enables me to combine my interests in International Human Rights Law, International Criminal Law and the Laws of Armed Conflict with the methods of Comparative Law and elements of Islamic Law. My thesis is also closely connected to broader issues of international peace and security, rule of law and democratisation as well as questions of legal and political theory, allowing for extensive background reading beyond my immediate discipline. Accordingly, the interdisciplinary nature of my work has led me to participate in events and projects in both international law and politics/international relations, which has proved to be extremely valuable and intellectually stimulating. In reflection of my research interests and expertise, I have been assigned teaching duties at the Law School and the School of Government and International Affairs.
I am also a recipient of the Ustinov College Scholarship, and have been involved in the steering committee of the Ustinov Café Politique since arriving in Durham; more recently, I have joined the editorial team of the Ustinovian, the College magazine.
Mihretu P. Guta, PhD Philosophy
I am a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy. My thesis attempts to show the advantage of substance ontology in providing us the most preferable framework, both on methodological as well as philosophical grounds, to have a better grip on the diachronic problem of personal identity. In this case, substance ontology plays multi-faceted roles in terms of allowing us for example, to make sense of the persistence of persons over time, intrinsic changes persons undergo while maintaining their identity over time, etc. However, substance ontology has not been taken seriously by the majority of philosophers. This is because, as many think, that given the advances in modern science, substance ontology is irrelevant. But I argue that ultimately, the controversy over the nature of the self is a metaphysical issue in that it is not for science to adjudicate what the nature of the self has to be. The conception of substance ontology I defend in this thesis can be taken as Aristotelian as opposed to Lockean. The category of substance has a fundamental ontological primacy over any other non-substantial entities such as events, places, time, properties (or tropes) and so on. I will argue that substance ontology understood in this way is indeed the most plausible and sustainable conception.
Peter Hertenstein, MA Management
As a MA in Management student at the Durham Business School, I am currently doing research on ‘Outward Foreign Direct Investments of China’s Automotive Industry into Developed Countries’. My research is based in the internationalization theory of the firm, the catch-up strategies of latecomers and the development of multinational enterprises from emerging markets. Since China’s outward FDI shows irregularities in its location choice, and since only very little research has been done before, an inductive qualitative research method seemed most applicable here.
The field research was done in China, where I conducted interviews between July and August 2012. Through the cooperation with Mercedes-Benz technology Consulting, which had an interest in the results of my research and thus supported me with resources like office space, hardware, and more importantly contacts in China’s automotive industry, I had the opportunity to visit different companies in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Ningbo.
Ariadne Schulz, MSc & PhD Anthropology
I'm completing my MSc dissertation in Paleopathology in September 2012 and will continue on to the PhD program in the same discipline. My MSc research concerns the relationship between the asymmetrical expression of osteoarthritis and the upper limb. The goal is to confirm or disprove the existence of an activity related pattern of degeneration and osseous reaction to mechanical loading. The research is potentially has medical applications, but is more directly useful to determining the polemic usefulness of various stress markers in the evaluation of archaeological populations.
My PhD research will compare the morphology of long bones mathematically expressed to the patterning of appendicular OA. The goal is to determine the critical limit of mechanical loading and morphological reaction in relation to pathological change in order to formulate preventative measures for the development of OA in modern populations and theoretically reconstruct the possible etiologies of pathological degeneration in past populations.
Bindi Chen, PhD Engineering & Computer Science
I started my PhD in January 2011 and currently work in the Energy Group and Innovative Computing Group. My research is fully funded by an EU project to examine the use of artificial intelligence approaches to detect wind turbine faults and the large-scale wind farm management. This research is a part of a large activity to improve the wind turbine reliability and reduce wind farm O&M cost. This research involves accessing 2 TB of real data, and in order to process such large amount of data, a dedicated server has been constructed in Durham University. The objectives of this research are: 1) Massive data processing: to handle 2TB real data and also feature with information extraction; 2) Fault prognosis and support decision making: use knowledge based of human expertise for problem solving and decision making. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in the field of fault diagnosis, wind energy or artificial intelligence for engineering application (www.bindichen.co.uk).
