Dr Freya Irani, Visiting Research Fellow, 1 November 2023 to 1 June 2024
Academic sponsor: Melanie Richter-Montpetit
Dr Irani's work examines the role of law (and in particular, US and international law) in constituting colonial global social relations.
At CAIT, she is working on a project entitled, “A Pain of Disappointment”: Property, Law and the Settled Expectations of Whiteness”. The project interrogates the relationship between law, race, colonialism and capitalism by tracing a single legal doctrine that is fundamental to much Anglo-American and international law: the protection of “legitimate expectations”.
The term “legitimate expectations” is used to refer to those policies, earnings, or ways of life that a party has “reasonably” come to anticipate. Given the supposed “reasonableness” of these expectations, courts treat their non-fulfillment as compensable wrongs. Dr Irani examines how the doctrine works to create a compensable property right, in particular social feelings of entitlement (to others’ life and land), which are themselves the products of racism and colonialism. In doing so, she shows that the protection of expectations serves as a key legal technology through which white and settler privilege are maintained and reproduced globally.
Professor Ijeoma Georgiana Umahi Ayuba, Visiting Professor, 1 July 2023 to 13 June 2024
Academic sponsor: Michael Collyer
Prof Ayuba is conducting research on re-thinking urban planning attitudes and strategies in light of Covid-19 and modern technologies, and on a formulation of a resilient urban planning approach.
Dr Christian Haddad, Visiting Research Fellow (working remotely), 6 February 2023 to 5 February 2026
Academic sponsor: Stefan Elbe
Dr Haddad’s research focuses on global health governance in the field of antimicrobial resistance (AMR); STS approaches to global health security crises; and the international political economy of pharmaceuticals.
Haddad’s current work explores AMR as a transboundary crisis of modern biopolitics that calls into question the dominant regimes of health, growth and security deeply rooted in the chemical infrastructures of readily available and effective pharmaceuticals.
Working mostly remotely, Dr Haddad is based in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna.
Dr Jana Fey, Honorary Research Fellow, 1 February 2023 to 30 June 2024
Academic sponsor: Stefan Elbe
Dr Fey is focusing her research on a project entitled The Medicalization of/in Global Politics. Bringing together expertise from different disciplines, this research project asks what types of knowledge formation are enabled or silenced through medicalization in international relations. The project interrogates the role medical frameworks play in producing our shared understandings of ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ behaviours.
Dr Maxmillan Martin, Honorary Research Fellow (working remotely), 23 January 2023 to 15 March 2024
Academic sponsor: Dominic Kniveton
Max Martin, a geographer, works closely with a Sussex team that looks at weather forecasts at different timescales streamlined with early warnings and disaster risk reduction. Currently on an extension of his original fellowship, he is studying how fishers act on early warning messages and the factors that influence early action based on them. His research, Fishers on the First Mile: Early Warning Early Action on the Arabian Sea Coast of South India is funded by the Red Cross Global Disaster Preparedness Center. He lives in Thiruvananthapuram district of Kerala state in India.
Dr David Fletcher, Visiting Research Fellow, 31 December 2022 to 31 December 2025
Academic sponsor: Carl Griffin
Dr Fletcher is working in collaboration with Prof Griffin to study maps and other topographic records of the royal forests and chases of England and Wales in the early modern period. This is part of a wider project of work on the use of maps by government to manage its territorial resources in this period thereby illuminating the transformative nature of such graphic records of land as mediators of change.
This research fellowship is an extension of an earlier one, which also looked at the status of royal forests and chases as hidden spaces of conflict and resistance in early modern England and originally focussed on late-eighteenth-century Parliamentary surveys.
Johnson Jament, Honorary Research Fellow, 7 December 2022 to 30 November 2025 (working remotely)
Academic sponsor: Filippo Osella
Working remotely –from Kerala, India– Johnson Jament has worked on a project, led by professor Osella, to research how Kerala artisanal fishers engage with localised weather forecasts and how these enhance safety and economic resilience in the face of climatic and environmental changes. Now he is in negotiations with the Kerala Government and respective agencies to develop a localised weather information service for artisanal fishers.
Johnson's co-authored Covid on the coast article was published online in June 2023. He is leading the publication of two more articles: one on the transformation of women's work in coastal communities (for the Indian Journal of Gender Studies) and the other on fishers’ protests against the Vizhinjam seaport construction by the Adani group.
He has set up a Coastal Resource Centre in Kerala to promote high-quality and impact research with reference to coastal communities and to foster educational engagements of students from coastal communities in the state.
Visakh Madhusoodanan Subha, Honorary Research Fellow, 7 December 2022 to 30 November 2025 (working remotely)
Academic sponsor: Filippo Osella
Visakh Madhusoodanan Subha is working on a project, led by professor Osella, that explores how artisanal fishers in Kerala engage with localised weather forecasts, and how these enhance the safety and economic resilience of fishing communities in the face of climatic and environmental changes. The project follows from a research project titled 'Forecasting with fishers: Co-producing knowledge for early warning of extreme weather events on the coast of South India,' funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK). The project aims to make South Indian artisanal fishers’ livelihoods more secure and sustainable by improving safety at sea. Dr Visakh plans to draw on his research to publish academic papers as well as work towards the institutional setting up of localised weather forecasting service for artisanal fishers in Kerala.
Dr Eva Hilberg, Honorary Research Fellow, 21 November 2022 to 30 September 2025 (working remotely)
Academic sponsor: Stefan Elbe
Amongst other topics, Dr Hilberg is researching the contemporary reality and administration of global health security, especially as it materialised in response to the pandemic. Collaborating with Prof Elbe, and working remotely for the period of her Fellowship, she is studying different governmental responses to outbreaks through case studies that will bring into relief underlying calculations and assumptions regarding future potentialities of catastrophic health scenarios.
Dr Dagmar Vorlíček, Visiting Research Fellow, 31 October 2022 to 30 September 2025 (working remotely)
Academic sponsor: Stefan Elbe
Home institution: University of Vienna, Department of Sociology
Dagmar Vorlíček researches the politics of global insecurities and specialises in International Political Sociology. As a VRF at the University of Sussex, working mostly from Vienna, Dr Vorlíček is collaborating with Prof Elbe, Dr Roemer-Mahler and other colleagues in the Centre for Global Health Policy to further her research interests in Global health governance. Her academic collaboration with the University of Sussex focuses on two main topics: first, heterodox global health and second, global health and information disorder.
Dr Tomáš Uxa, Visiting Research Fellow, 4 April 2022 to 3 April 2024
Academic sponsor: Julian Murton
Dr Uxa’s work during his fellowship includes conducting pilot experiments on the effects of ground deformation due to frost heave and thaw settlement on the thermal regime of permafrost and seasonally frozen ground in the Permafrost Laboratory. This work will provide novel experimental data to improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art temperature models of freezing and thawing grounds. Linked to this, he has also prepared a project proposal to the Czech Science Foundation to build on the pilot experiments in the Permafrost Laboratory and to extend them further with simulations of different ground materials and climate conditions.
He is planning to co-author with Prof Murton a publication based on the experimental results obtained as well as to involve him in research of the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences aimed at reconstructing past periglaciations in the Czech Republic.
Dr Juan Pedro Rodríguez-López, Honorary Research Fellow, 1 March 2022 to 31 January 2025
Academic sponsor: Julian Murton
The topics Dr Rodríguez-López is addressing in his research include:
- Pre-Quaternary cryospheric processes in deep time
- Palaeoclimate of desert basins and aeolian depositional systems
- Facies models for pre-Quaternary permafrost systems
- Mesozoic cryospheric processes in Iberia and China
- Cenozoic cryospheric processes in Tibet
- Recent plateau desert cryosphere in Western Himalayas
- Proterozoic cryospheric and aeolian processes in Australia and India
- Palaeoclimate dynamics in deep time
He has collaborated with Prof. Julian Murton on several international scientific papers including on the discovery of Permafrost in the Cretaceous super greenhouse (Nature Communications, 2022) and on plateau proglacial lacustrine systems in Eocene-Oligocene rocks of Tibet (Geology, 2023).
Dr Stefan Pedersen, Honorary Research Fellow, 1 February 2022 to 30 September 2023
Academic sponsor and research centre: Peter Newell; CAIT
Dr Pedersen’s research interests focus on planetary politics. He approaches this multifaceted and transdisciplinary issue from his background in political theory and is currently working on prospects of world order and planetary justice in the context of intensifying climate emergency. During his visit, he is introducing colleagues in the IR department to this perspective and is hoping to create and extend links to a global network of scholars engaged in work in this area.
He plans to present work in progress at department seminars and give guest lectures in courses on environmental politics and IR theory.
Professor Janet Nichol, Honorary Professor, 3 January 2022 to 31 December 2024
Academic sponsor: Alexander Antonarakis
Professor Nichol is an Applied Geographer, specialising in Remote Sensing, Geo-Informatics and Environmental Change. Her main research interests are in the application of remote sensing to air and water pollution including satellite-derived aerosol and water quality monitoring. She has also published extensively on thermal remote sensing of the urban heat island, and landscape change including agricultural and forest resources, especially in context of global climatic change. Much of her work has been carried out in northern Nigeria, Hong Kong, and east Asia.
During her visit she is collaborating on a research project for baseline mapping of kelp forest regeneration along the Sussex coast using remote sensing, with local and regional conservation bodies including Sussex Wildlife Trust, Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Association, Zoological Society of London, Sussex Underwater, and other universities.