In 2004 I was appointed as Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Policy and Sociology at the University of Kent. I moved to the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, in September 2007, where I was appointed as Lecturer in Sociology and Deputy Director of the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies.
NATIONALISM, RACIALIZATION AND SOCIAL INEQUALITIES IN EUROPE
This strand of research concerns the emergence of ‘orientalist’ discourses in various parts of the continent, and relates these discourses to the myth of European origins and the articulation of national identity. I have explored manifestations of Europeanism and European nationalism in the context of state-formation, institutionalised memory and forgetting, the development of human sciences (such as history and anthropology) and collective self-presentations to significant (political) others. Aspects of this project are now brought together in a book that will be published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2008 under the title ‘Nation-Building and the Dialogics of Reciprocity: Re-visioning Identity in Europe’. The monograph vies for a theoretical understanding of the origins of nation-building in Europe, locating them in the damaged cultural and political reciprocities of the nineteenth-century political plateau. Drawing on the work of various thinkers (such as Michael Herzfeld, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michael Gardiner, Axel Honneth, Gerard Delanty, Jürgen Habermas, Fred Dallmayr, Sheyla Benhabib and many more), it articulates a ‘dialogics of esteem’ for the specificity of cultural intimacies.
In tandem, in the last two years I developed research that explores contemporary manifestations of nationalism, especially in the context of the Olympic Games and football. This strand of research, which mobilises social theory to explore expressions of nationalism in the context of Europeanisation, has a very strong socio-historical focus. More recently, I have also extended my past interests to examine contemporary overlaps of racism and nationalism, ethnic discrimination and social exclusion. My primary interest is in the emergence of racist discourses in Greece and its etiological connections with the country's marginal status in the global political arena.
Currently, I also work in a team on a European project under the title ‘Ethnic differences in education and diverging prospects for urban youth in an enlarged Europe: a comparative investigation into ethnically diverse communities with second-generation migrants and Roma’ (dir. Professor Fiona Williams). The project aims to study how ethnic differences in education contribute to the prospects for minority ethnic youth and their peers in urban settings in Western, Central and Eastern Europe. Through a cross-cultural analysis, it will explore how far existing educational policies, practices and experiences, in markedly different welfare regimes, protect minority ethnic youth against marginalisation and social exclusion. In ethnically diverse urban communities, schools often become targets for locally organised political struggles shaped by a broader political and civic culture of ethnic mobilisation. The project will critically examine the role of education in the processes of 'minoritisation'.
TOURISM, GLOBALIZATION AND RESISTANCE
My other research field is related to instances of 'cinematic tourism'. I have examined the relationship between film and tourist industries (their merging into what I have termed ‘global culture industries) and the contribution of film to the consumption of identity and culture in tourist destinations. In a monograph published by Routledge (International Library of Sociology) in 2007 (‘The Cinematic Tourist: Exploration in Globalization, Culture and Resistance’) I look at the importance of film production and reception in the generation and/or further advertising of tourist destinations, the patterns of local, state and global resistance emerging tourist industries may generate and the impact this phenomenon has on the construction and destruction of a global public sphere. Recently, I was invited to participate in the Mediterranean mobilities group that is convened by the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University, where I co-organized a workshop on migration and human rights (COSMOPOLITAN PARADOXES: MIGRATION AND EMERGENT SYSTEMS OF TRANSNATIONAL RIGHTS, 29 June 2007).
REPRESENTATIONS OF DEVIANCY.
I have examined the criminalisation of gender, ethnicity and ‘race’ in Hollywood film, and the relationship of such representations of criminality with social stereotyping and political discourses on crime. This involved collaboration and co-authoring of a series of articles with colleagues from Keele University, the University of Central Lancashire and Lancaster University. A related sideline has been some sole-authored work on representations and political reasonance of kidnapping in the context of globalisation. The study was based on reflections on the nature of collective violence and relates to other work I have done on nation-formation and the monopoly of violence by the nation-state.