I’m a feminist researcher and writer working at the intersection of gender studies and peace/conflict studies, including a recent concern with refugees and asylum seekers. I use photography in connection with research and activism.
In academic terms, in the early 1990s I was granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Lund, in Sweden, and was in more recent years awarded a visiting chair in the Department of Sociology at City University London and an honorary chair in the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick. Politically, I’m involved in the international feminist antimilitarist networks Women in Black against War and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
From 1995 until 2014 I was working closely with women peace activists in conflictual countries, doing qualitative action-research. I first made a sequence of studies of particular women’s organizations working across ethno-national lines in Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Israel/Palestine and Cyprus – organizations whose work I also tried to support in practical ways. I then went on to make a study of women’s activism against war, worldwide, published in 2007 as ‘From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis’, Zed Books. This was followed by a major research project that is reported in the book 'Antimilitarism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Peace Movements’ (Palgrave 2012) which features movements in S.Korea, Japan, Spain, the UK and elsewhere.
From 2014 to 2017 I was researching in and on London as a highly diverse city with localities featuring different communities of migrants, many from war-afflicted countries. I paid particular attention to women's experiences of flight and resettlement. This work has recently been published as 'Looking to London: Stories of War, Escape and Asylum' (Pluto Press, 2017).
Looking further back, prior to 1995 my research involved local governance; then feminist gender studies of the labour process, the sexual division of labour, and change in the workplace; men, masculinity and skill; transformative change in trade unions and employing organizations; and the gender relations of technology. Some of my publications from this earlier period are ‘The Local State’;’Brothers’; ‘Machinery of Dominance’; ‘Gender and Technology in the Making’; and ‘In the Way of Women’.