Independent Researcher

About

My academic research examines contested authority in the cultural and heritage sector, analysing concepts of cultural value, cultural policy, arts funding, and cultural property issues, in particular: the repatriation of human remains and objects. I am interested in how culture is given causal properties to ‘do stuff’ like raise self-esteem, regenerate community, and contribute to the economy, at the same time as western society is less and less clear on what culture is. I am analysing concepts of the audience and the public, as envisaged by arts organisations, with a comparative, historical element. All these interests are underpinned by a study of authority and how today it has to continually justify itself and is constantly questioned.

My research also examines the symbolic meanings and strategic use of human remains, and how the body becomes a locale for so many cultural, political, and ethical debates. This is the focus for the Bones Collective – a research network I am part of – at Edinburgh University. And I am interested in memorialisation, commemoration and cultural reflections on death and what they reveal about attitudes towards human life.

My monograph, based on my PhD research, Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: the crisis of cultural authority was published by Routledge in Autumn 2010. I am working on my next book – Keeping Their Marbles Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of Antiquity Ended Up in Museums – And Why They Should Stay – on the repatriation debate, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

Previously, I was a Visiting Fellow  at the London School of Economics, in the Department of Law, where I continue to be involved in establishing a research hub on cultural property, cultural policy, art law and heritage issues.

I am the Culture Section Co-Editor, alongside Professor Tammy Anderson of Sociology Compass (SOCO), a peer-reviewed journal that presents review articles surveying topics of interest within sociology. The journal strives to be readable, so that its contents will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate sociology students, as well as professionals. I welcome ideas for submissions that survey current thinking and seek to clarify contentious issues in cultural sociology.

I am the editor of a special edition of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, which aims to address the lack of critical thinking and research into cultural interventions carried out in the name of statebuilding, which will be published in 2012.

I am the arts and society director of the London based think-tank, the Institute of Ideas, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Co-Convener of the BSA group Sociologists Outside Academia, and write for the national press on cultural and arts related issue.

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