Professor of Sociology, Temple University After publishing journal articles on the Sociology of Work and Organizations, Education, and Crime, I discovered my greatest sociological passion--the study of cities and communities. I am especially fascinated by urban artistic communities, both past and present, and have utilized the historic constructs of "bourgeois" and "bohemian" to compare and contrast such communities. My book, Artistic Enclaves in the Post-Industrial City: The Case of Lawrenceville Pittsburgh (Springer, 2017), maintains that Lawrenceville's struggling artists have integrated bourgeois and bohemian practices and values to build a sustainable artistic enclave. I have also studied artistic community life in Philadelphia with the help of Sociology doctoral students Rachel Wildfeuer and Keith McIntosh. We recently sent our joint article on Fishtown/Kensington's artistic community to a scholarly journal. Our thesis is that Fishtown/Kensington artists have created an "Artistic Bohemian Lifestyle community" that maintains a significant degree of consistency with the traditional bohemian lifestyle, but that is not animated by the anti-bourgeois attitudes that have been foundational to bohemian community life.
Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory, The University of Melbourne Ghassan Hage is the University of Melbourne's Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Ghassan joined the University of Melbourne in 2008 after fifteen years of teaching and researching at the University of Sydney. As a Future Generation Professor he works at fostering inter-disciplinary research across the university. Ghassan has published widely in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, racism and migration. His work fuses approaches from political economy, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. He is a reknowned expert in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. For many years and until Bourdieu's death he was an associate researcher in the latter's research centre at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Ghassan is currently working on two ARC supported projects: The experience and circulation of political emotions concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict among Muslim immigrants in the Western world; and 'The Politics of Negotiation' as a critical way of re-conceiving inter-cultural relations. He is the author and editor of many works including White Nation and Against Paranoid Nationalism. His most recent work is the edited volume: Force, Movement, Intensity: The Newtonian Imagination in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
Professor of Criminal Law, University of the West of England I joined UWE Bristol Law School in June 2023 as Professor of Criminal Law, specialising in international and transnational criminal law, comparative criminal law, and post-conflict justice. I serve on the board of directors of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) in Cape Town and I am a member of the advisory council of the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, Whitney R Harris World Law Institute, Washington University (St Louis) in the United States. I am a fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, London, a senior research fellow at the Robert Bosch Stiftung, Berlin, a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in Germany and a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in South Africa. I am regional editor of the Criminal Law Forum (Springer Press) and serve on the editorial advisory boards of the South African Journal of Criminal Justice (Juta) and The Journal of Criminal Law (SAGE).
Senior Lecturer in Welsh, Swansea University Gwennan Higham specialises in Welsh sociolinguistics, particularly the linguistic integration of international migrants in Wales. Her research is international in scope, including comparative work with French in Quebec. Her most recent publication is 'Developing personal integration projects through a Welsh language provision for adult migrants in Wales' (2024). Her work has also been published in prominent peer-reviewed journals including Language Policy and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.
Research Officer in Public Health, Swansea University Gemma Williams is a Research Officer in Public Health at Swansea University. Gemma is an autistic Early Career Researcher, whose Linguistics PhD investigated the breakdowns in mutual understanding that can occur between autistic and non-autistic people, based on the idea of the ‘double empathy problem’. Her doctoral research has also included a focus on loneliness in autism and the use of creative and participatory methodologies. Prior to joining Swansea University as a Research Officer on the Wellcome Trust-funded ‘Autism: from menstruation to menopause’ project led by Dr Aimee Grant, Gemma held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Brighton in Social Policy. Gemma is a member of the Westminster Commission on Autism and an Associate with the National Development Team for Inclusion where she’s contributed to a number of commissioned reports, projects and inquiries aimed at improving service provision for autistic and neurodivergent people within the UK, NHS England and Local Authorities. Gemma is currently working on her monograph ‘Understanding Others in a Neurodiverse World’, due for publication by Pavilion Press in 2024.
Senior Lecturer in Palaeoclimate, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington At the Antarctic Research Centre, I am engaged in Marsden-funded research looking into the stability of the Ross Ice Shelf. This research focuses on the past response of the Ross Ice Shelf to climatic change, and how this has influenced ocean circulation in the Southern Ocean, including around New Zealand.
