IAS Sponsored Projects 2018/19
Introduction
In 2018/19, the IAS will be sponsoring four major research projects, described below. The IAS Fellowship scheme now requires Fellows to undertake some collaborative work with Durham's academic community. Applicants are therefore invited either to apply to work collaboratively with one of the four main projects, or to suggest a specific collaborative endeavor with other Durham researchers.
Project Title: An Abolitionist Industrial Complex:Patterns of anti-trafficking / anti-slavery policy and practice in the 21st century
Theme(s): Trafficking and slavery
Summary: The project will bring together scholars from a range of disciplinary (and cross-disciplinary) backgrounds to develop a methodological approach for tracing the contours of the global anti-trafficking / anti-slavery field. Anti-trafficking / anti-slavery policy and practice have been expanding over the last two decades but critical analysis has often been limited to particular actors (or groups of actors). Documentation and analysis of the field as a whole is therefore necessary. The participants and fellows, all of whom have produced scholarly work on anti-trafficking and/or anti-slavery, therefore seek to develop an interdisciplinary methodological approach for mapping the anti-trafficking / anti-slavery field. Through the seminar series, the project will be informed by and engage with scholars and practitioners working on the socio-political economies of activism, advocacy and (public and private) policy in other issue areas. It will result in a grant proposal to apply the methodology in developing an analytical resource which maps the anti-trafficking / anti-slavery field.
Term: Michaelmas 2018
Principal Investigator: Dr Siobhán McGrath, Department of Geography, siobhan.mcgrath@durham.ac.uk
Co Investigator: Dr Alison Jobe, School of Applied Social Sciences, alison.jobe@durham.ac.uk
IAS Fellows: to be confirmed
Project Title: Masculinities in Martial Sports: West, East and Global South
Theme(s): Masculinities and Sport
Summary: Masculinities in Martial Sports will investigate through an interdisciplinary, trans-national methodology ‘hard and masculine’ sports from different areas of the globe, and their relationship to the shaping of gender orders. Kushti (Indian wrestling), Japanese Aikido and Western boxing form the subject sports.
Masculinities are constantly constructed, contested and altered in a complex interplay between the legacies of the past, the demands of the present and the expectations for the future, with organized modern sports playing a significant role in this process. Seen historically, the invention of modern sports, including the ‘hard’ sports analysed here, can be interpreted as a significant social mechanism through which men responded to various crises surrounding masculinity from the 19th-century onwards. Anthropologically, the embodied aspect of sport makes it particularly powerful in shaping the forms of masculinities that are consumed and performed in societies.
The project will test and refine Connell’s (1987) theory of the gender order as a dynamic system of power relations, specifically her notion of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ from a historical and anthropological perspective. It will create a strong network of international scholars, and develop plans for a major grant application to explore historical and geographical variation in men and women’s experience of masculinity.
Term: Michaelmas 2018
Principal Investigator: Professor Kay Schiller, Department of History, kay.schiller@durham.ac.uk
IAS Fellows: to be confirmed
Project Title: Who are “We the People”? Community beyond the state
Theme(s): Community State
Summary: “The people” are sovereign; “the people’s will” must prevail; but who are “the people”? Who gets to belong to this group, and who decides? How do individuals coalesce into a collective “people”, and what other communities are formed in the same way?
This project, drawing on Durham’s strengths in Classics, Law, Human Geography, Politics, and History, investigates how individuals come together to form communities which are legal or social entities in themselves.
One strand, led primarily by Classics and CNCS (who will be holding a parallel lecture series on popular sovereignty) will consider definitions of “the people” from antiquity to today, from the populus Romanus to ‘real Americans’. The second, led primarily by colleagues in Law and SGIA, will explore contemporary communities larger or smaller than the state, from the Cham people in Southeast Asia to Scottish nationalists, and from identity groups looking to find their place within a state to groups seeking recognition as part of the international community.
The project seeks to draw prestigious visiting fellows to the project, and will feed into multiple departments’ strategic plans for internationalisation. The primary outputs will be a seven-figure grant application led by Dr Amy Russell, but an equally important goal will be developing new research areas and collaborations, and methodologies.
Term: Epiphany 2019
Principal Investigator: Dr Amy Russell, Department of Classics and Ancient History, amy.russell@durham.ac.uk
IAS Fellows: to be confirmed
Project Title: Dynamic Interactions at Cell Membrane Interfaces
Theme(s): Medical Futures
Summary: Membrane Nanoparticles (MNPs) are small vesicles ubiquitously released into bodily fluids from cells. They have therapeutic potential in immune therapy, vaccination, regenerative medicine, drug delivery, personalized medicine and point-of-care market (projected £1 billion/year by 2022).
A handful of recent reports have shown that the physical properties of MNPs can be related to their function, in particular with respect to ageing, cancer and diabetes propagation. This presents a unique, but time sensitive, opportunity for low cost and fast, point-of-care and longitudinally based biodiagnostics relying on cheaper and more easily accessible physical properties of MNPs from liquid biopsies (e.g. lab-on-chip platform).
This project aims at (i) exploiting technology developed by engineers and physicists at Durham University to measure the biophysical properties of synthetic membrane nano-vesicles will be tested on natural MNPs for future lab-on-chip diognostic. (ii) It will develop an interdisciplinary network of UK scientists and companies interested in the field, starting from the expertise available here at Durham, but also including strategic key players. This is crucial for the development of the field in the UK post Brexit. The network will serve as springboard for initiating grant applications to external funding bodies (RCUK, Wellcome Trust, etc).
Term: Epiphany 2019
Principal Investigator: Dr Kislon Voitchovsky, Department of Physics, kislon.voitchovsky@durham.ac.uk
IAS Fellows: to be confirmed
