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Bredull, Jenny
Jenny joined the Gender Institute to pursue a doctorate in 2009, concentrating on alternative families. Prior to this she received a BA in Media and Cultural Studies with English Literary Studies at Middlesex University and an MA in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College.
Her research interests include intimacy, identity, belonging and ambivalence, sexuality and gender. Her PhD project explores contemporary refigurations of sexual norms and belonging in an analysis of constructions of "family" in LGBT organisations.
She is also working as a research assistant in the department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College and is part of the editorial team of the GI blog Engenderings.
Castellini, Alessandro
Alessandro Castellini received a BA degree in Languages and Civilizations of the Far East from Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy). He holds a MA degree in Gender Studies from The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and since 2009 he is PhD student at the Gender Institute (LSE) with a thesis whose provisional title is "Maternal Ambivalence: An Investigation of the Discursive Constructions of Maternal Filicide in 1970s Japan."
In his PhD project he intends to examine what he identifies as a central ambivalence to motherhood in feminism and to highlight motherhood as the locus of inherent ambiguities and contradictions. His research takes 1970s Japan as a study case: it aims to explore the ways in which maternal ambivalence has forcefully emerged in relation to the soaring phenomenon of maternal filicide in that decade, and to its discursive construction both in the hegemonic discourse on motherhood and within feminist counter narratives.
Conroy, Amanda
Gender, ‘Race’ and Boundary-Phobia: Xenophobia and Constructions of Masculinity and Citizenship in the US Border-Control Militia Movement
Amanda Conroy is a PhD Student in Gender Studies at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her dissertation uses ethnographic methods to trace the intersections between masculinity, citizenship and state sovereignty in the Minuteman movement, a set of loosely-organized groups of U.S. citizens who organize patrols of the US-Mexico border in order to protect ‘national sovereignty’ and prevent illegal migration. It is interdisciplinary in approach, integrating international relations with feminist political theory and gender studies. As such it departs from traditional International Relations, which arranges locales of analysis hierarchically, privileging studies of world systems and states over the actions of individuals and the ideas and discourses that construct fields of ethical, moral and political possibilities. The goal of her project is to integrate empirical research and theory in order to better understand the causes of nativism and nationalism.
Amanda’s broader research interests include Renaissance and early Enlightenment political thought; contemporary political philosophy; feminist and post-colonial political theory; right-wing and conservative social movements; the intersections between gender, race, and nationalism; and the gendered dimensions of citizenship.
She received an MA (with Distinction) in Gender Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (UK) in 2009 and a BA (Honours) in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College (USA) in 2007. In addition to her doctoral work, Amanda is on the editorial team of the Graduate Journal of Social Science (http://gjss.org) and Engenderings, the LSE Gender Institute blog. She writes for Engenderings and the LSE British Politics and Policy blog and has written for the Guardian.
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Franchi, Marina
The Analysis of Italian Media Discourse on the issue of Unions De Facto
Marina Franchi received a Laurea cum mentione at the University of Eastern Piedmont (Italy). She worked within various EU funded projects as a junior researcher in the Department of Social Research in the Faculty of Political Sciences of Alessandria. In 2004 she joined the LSE to undertake a MSc in Gender and Media. Between 2006 and 2008 she worked at the EU-Daphne II project Family Matters- Supporting families to prevent violence against homosexual youth. In her PhD project she conducts a research on Media Discourse on the legal recognition of de facto couples in Italy. Through the analysis of media texts she aims to gain an insight into Italian sexual politics, and to facilitate a fruitful understanding of the relationships between dominant notions of family, kinship and sexual citizenship in contemporary Italy.
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Gray, Harriet
Harriet is a first year PhD student at the Gender Institute. After graduating with a degree in Japanese Studies from the University of Sheffield, Harriet went on to gain a Master’s degree in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London. Upon leaving SOAS she worked for two years at Refuge, the national domestic violence charity. At LSE, Harriet is researching domestic violence within UK armed service families.
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Holly, Chris
'Passionate Celibacy': A sociolinguistic analysis of adult women who choose to abstain from sexual relations.
Hyde, Alex
In the Line of Duty: Theorizing Military Wives as Migrants
Alexandra Hyde's PhD research is a comparative study of British and American military bases overseas. The aim is to investigate how gender, transnationalism and militarisation combine to shape the everyday lives of military spouses in multiple national contexts.
Alex has a BA in English from Cambridge University and an MA in Gender Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her professional background is in facilitating arts, media and international development projects for social change. She currently manages policy and advocacy communications for research programmes in Ghana, Kenya and Senegal at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
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Kalogeras, Joanne
Troubling Cosmopolitanism. A synthesis of normative and non- normative approaches:
I am in the process of completing my doctorate at the London School of Economics’ Gender Institute, where I also received my master’s degree in 2005. My thesis investigates normative cosmopolitan theory within political and moral philosophy, by using the work of feminist, queer and postcolonial theorists. My goal is the construction of a new, critical cosmopolitan theory that takes into account critiques of its structural components.
I have served on the executive committee of the Feminist Women's Studies Association (FWSA) from 2007 to 2009 and am a member of the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) PhD Student Forum, London School of Economics. I have presented papers on critical cosmopolitan theory at the Association of American Geographers 2008 Conference (Boston) and the 2007 sex/life/politics conference (Loughborough), as well as at the CCS PhD Forum. I will be presenting a paper at the CBEES Cosmopolitanism in a Wider Context conference at Södertörn University (South Stockholm) in 11/2011. I have written for the FWSA and am presently blogging for The New Civil Rights Movement |, a U.S. LGBTQ civil rights web site.
I have been a queer activist since my early college days, and those experiences have provided a valuable dimension to my theoretical research. I served on the Board of Directors of Digital Queers (a high tech activist organisation) from 1994 to 1996, and I have been involved in the campaign to repeal Don't Ask/Don't Tell (the U.S. military’s ban on homosexuals serving openly), specifically through working with Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, since the mid 1990s. Issues surrounding social marginalisation and deviance are empirical as well as theoretical to me, and I strive for coherence and understanding between the two approaches.
I grew up outside of Chicago, and studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago before moving to San Francisco in 1986, where I spent most of the 1980s and 90s in the software industry. I still consider San Francisco my home.
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Mannell, Jenevieve
Exploring the challenges of mainstreaming gender for southern African community-based organisations: The importance of context
Marhia, Natasha
'Human security', gender, and the policing of everyday violence against women in Delhi
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Pedersen, Linda Lund
How did the Muslim women's attires become a problem in Denmark? - A research of the construction of Whiteness, Neutrality and 'We'
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Sezener, Aysegul
Muslim Politics of Gender in Turkey
Shen, Yang
Yang is a second year PhD student at LSE funded by China Scholarship Council. Her current research topic is New-generation Migrant Workers in the Catering Sector in Shanghai. Her research Interests cover Gender and migration, contemporary China Studies, Poverty reduction. She has organised a volunteering group for children in rural Guizhou Province for four years and she is now a columnist for the newspaper UKChinese|.
Shephard, Nicole
Nicole is a PhD candidate at the LSE Gender Institute. Under the working title "Towards a queer intersectional approach to subjectivity formation in transnational social spaces" , her project conceptually explores how people become transnational subjects.
The analysis engages with the notion of transnational social space emerging from transnational migration studies and poststructuralist conceptions of subjectivity formation on the one hand, as well as feminist and postcolonial interventions into transnational migration research and queer migrations literature on the other. Drawing on intersectional theories in gender studies and the queering of methodologies beyond the study of queer subjects, the project then explores the productive gaps and overlaps between these conceptual and empirical literatures to propose a queer intersectional framework for research on transnational subjects. To illustrate and critically evaluate how this emerging framework plays out in an empirical context, it will be adopted in a case study on the production of subjectivities within the British Shouth Asian transnational social space.
Nicole has a BA (insigni cum laude) in Social Policy and Social Work with a minor in Social Anthropology from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and an MSc (with distinction) in International Development from the University of Bristol. Her pre-academic professional background is in IT and Human Resources with a focus on Process Management and Project Management.
Simmonds, Lindsay
How social construct and religious imperative wrestle for precedence in the lives of British Orthodox Jewish women - a Butlerian analysis.
Spruce, Emma
Following an Undergraduate Degree in French and Politics at Sheffield University and a Diploma in International Relations at Sciences-Po (Paris) Emma came to the LSE in 2009 to undertake an MSc in Gender (research). She rejoined the Gender Institute in 2011 and is now conducting ESRC-funded PhD research which focuses on the approach to queer women adopted by the UK Asylum System.
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Wong, Yennee
Sub-Saharan African households
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Zagrebelsky, Laura
Analysis of family law case law in Germany, France, Italy and UK: the paradox of multicultural vulnerability