PI: Dr Katharina Karcher, Senior Lecturer in German, University of Birmingham. Katharina has a long standing research interest in terrorism and political violence. In the context of UrbTerr, she is interested in the question of how terrorist violence is distinguished from other forms of violence and how we can think differently about political violence in the past and future.
Postdoctoral researcher: Dr Evelien Geerts. Evelien is a multidisciplinary philosopher (PhD University of California, Santa Cruz) with a keen interest in critical epistemologies, political philosophy, and new materialisms. In the context of the UrbTerr project, she hopes to continue building onto her critical cartography of new materialist theories of justice and response-ability.
Research Assistant: Mia Parkes. Mia is a Midlands4Cities funded PhD candidate at the University. Her research project focusses on carceral testimony and women’s migration, detention and political imprisonment across the last century. In the context of UrbTerr, she is also interested in who and what is considered ‘political’ and how this is reflected within the legal system.
Doctoral Researcher: Yordanka Dimcheva. Yordanka will start her PhD project at the University of Birmingham in October 2020. Her research interests lie in studying the human body as a frame for war experience, the ethics of researching violence and armed conflicts as well as narrative methods in research. In the context of the UrbTerr project, she is interested in embodied and affective experiences of the recent terrorist attacks in France and hopes to build on her knowledge on the role of emotions in the aftermath of the events.
Doctoral Researcher: Camila Suarez. Camila is interested in emotion studies, particularly the history of emotions, and memory studies. She is also an enthusiast of cross-disciplinary qualitative research and research-creation methods. In the context of the UrbTerr project, she will address how emotional experiences related to terrorist attacks have shaped different memory discourses in Spain and the role of those emotional experiences in the emergence of grassroots actions of memorialisation that allow for transformations of the experience of urban terrorism.
Doctoral Researcher: Mireya Toribio Medina. Mireya’s research interests lie in the impact that both terrorist activity and counter-terrorism efforts have in societies. In the context of the UrbTerr project, she hopes to build on a debate between relevant actors at the intersection of social, cultural, anthropological, legal, and gender perspectives to make a critical contribution to the debate on how to describe, explain, predict and prevent the processes of political violence.