Research themes

Our research into humanitarian interventions encompasses their history, culture, impacts and future.

Our cutting-edge research work is organised into three themes.

Health, wellbeing and social justice

Health is internationally recognised as a human right, encompassing physical, mental and emotional wellbeing and access to the care and conditions that enable good health.

Yet how to achieve health and wellbeing - and even how we understand the concept of health itself - remain contentious questions, highlighting the limitations of rights frameworks and the effects of global inequalities.

This research stream includes work on the influences of medical practices in different settings and for different groups.

The research considers how access to healthcare has been denied as part of political or military agendas, and how the struggle for social justice has proposed forms of direct action and solidarity as alternative frameworks for change.

People

PhD students

Projects

Knowledge production in intervention and response

Research in this theme interrogates the epistemologies of intervention, drawing attention to how knowledge production can constrain and enable different responses.

This includes work on the politics of data, how they shape the understanding of conflict and crisis, and how they are used to facilitate certain types of intervention.

It considers representations of humanitarianism and disaster response in narrative and iconography, highlighting the ethics of representation and the power of voice, and seeks to diversify the range and combination of academic disciplines that policy-makers and practitioners consult when developing interventions, whether local, national, or international.

People

Projects

Spaces of peace, conflict and crisis

Research in this theme recognises the spatial dimensions of conflict and societies affected by crisis, using a diversity of analytical approaches, from geographic information systems (GIS) to the arts.

It explores how people experience and navigate disasters, violence, and emergency, and how these experiences are shaped by their identities, by the opportunities and challenges of displacement, and in their roles as economic, social, and political agents.

This research stream also considers how physical and digital infrastructures influence the way individuals and institutions engage with each other in times of upheaval.

People

  • Professor Larissa Fast - Executive Director and Professor of Humanitarian and Conflict Studies
  • Dr Roisin ReadSenior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies
  • Dr Birte VogelDeputy Director and Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies
  • Dr Nat O'Grady Pathway Lead for MSc International Disaster Management and Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Disaster
  • Dr Rubina Jasani Lecturer in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response
  • Dr Kirsten HowarthLecturer in Humanitarian Studies and Conflict Response
  • Dr Ayham Fattoum - Lecturer in Disaster Operations Management
  • Dr Antoine Burgard - Pathway Lead for MA Humanitarian and Conflict Response, and Lecturer in Contemporary History of Humanitarianism and Disaster
  • Dr Jessica HawkinsUndergraduate Programme Director and Senior Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies
  • Dr Amanda McCorkindale - Postgraduate Teaching Director and Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies

PhD students

Projects