My intellectual background
My most recent work focuses on institutional racism in UK and US universities. I published in August 2024 work that examines how the most senior management in North Atlantic Rim universities reinforce institutional racism to protect the reputation of their institutions. Prior to this, I looked at how the Race Equality Charter was compromised by vested elite White interests and priorities in the UK. There are bite-sized extracts on the blog pages here.
My research began with the Cambodian peacekeeping operation in 1991 and expanded to watching the West pushing Liberal conversion therapy onto many more former colonies in the name of peacebuilding. Seeing a new era of imperialism ascendant steered me into postcolonial scholarship, whereupon, after a couple of decades of fieldwork in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa ended by institutional cowardice and risk aversion, I joined a Business School and adapted its research agenda to my interests. Foucault helped me explain how University Senior Management execute their will through innumerable institutional nodes, like Deans, HR departments and Security Offices. A dalliance with Bourdieu’s field theory followed, helping me interpret senior management as capturing the labour of employees of Colour, and their White allies, to repurpose antiracist agendas for corporate gain. And that, via Derrick Bell’s work on interest convergence and the permanence of racism, and Malcolm X’s transformative work, brought me to researching the elite Colour-Power Matrix evident in UK Higher Education senior management.
The pedagogic outcome of this trajectory is a new module on decolonizing business studies, taught using multimedia methods that themselves decolonize the hegemonic textual pedagogy common to western Higher Education
RECENT & KEY PUBLICATIONS
Opposing Trends in Antiracism in North Atlantic Rim Universities: Converging Interests or Public Non-Performativity?
Evidence from an international academic survey of non-managerial university minorities, comprising mainly academics and conducted in 2021 reveals a trend whereby Sara Ahmed’s model of performativity and non-performativity in antiracism is shown to be contingent upon the reputational interests of university senior management, as predicted in Derrick Bell’s convergence theory. This article presents a new synthesized model to explain and predict the trend of non-performativity in university antiracist practices, and then identifies further strands of research that might focus on closing the convergence gap to make antiracism leadership more substantive.
The Ultimate Guide to Visual Lectures
This book is about university lectures across the disciplines. It shows us how to make students more engaged, active and included in our lectures. It draws on fifty years of academic research into cognition, and on the best and latest in Multimedia Learning (MML) research. It also draws from decades of the author’s own lecture practice.
Do Equality Regimes change Inequality Regimes? A study of the implementation and impact of the Race Equality Charter in UK universities
This paper presents the findings of a national survey investigating the extent to which the REC is challenging institutional racism in UK universities. The data shows that managerial engagement with, and commitment to, structural reform is compromised by the need to prevent acknowledgment of such change from affecting public perceptions of their universities. The data also shows that the most senior management levels are aided in protecting institutional reputation at the expense of authentic engagement with the REC process by other divisions of the university, with Human Resources being particularly problematic.
Political Transition in Cambodia 1991-99: Power, Elitism and Democracy
This book illustrates the limits to the 1990s UNTAC peacekeeping intervention in Cambodia and raises a critical challenge to the assumptions underpinning key tenets of the 'Liberal Project' as a mechanism for resolving complex, severe struggles for elite political power in developing countries. It highlights the limitations of externally imposed power-sharing. The book challenges assumptions regarding the inevitability of the globalization of liberalism as a means of ordering non-western societies. It explains the failure of democratic transition in terms of the impropriety and weakness of the plan which preceded it, and in terms of the elite's traditional reliance on absolutism and resistance to the concept of 'Opposition'.
Geek saviours to the rescue? Primitive accumulation, astropropriation, and exoimperialism in NewSpace entrepreneurship
In this paper, we examine the contemporary commercial space race – colloquially known as NewSpace – from a Marxian, technofeminist and decolonial perspective. Theorising the emergent entrepreneurial activities aimed at the human colonisation and exploitation of outer space as part of an ongoing process of primitive accumulation, we contribute innovative conceptualisations of 21st century entrepreneurial space adventurism as exoimperialism, and the privatisation of outer space resources as astropropriation. We develop the notion of geek saviourism as a function of the new geek hegemony within normative white masculinity...
An important contemporary challenge to the large-group lecture in higher education is that it encourages passive learning which is claimed to be out of sync with academic rhetoric and social needs. This article tests recent multimedia learning propositions which claim that using certain images dislocates pedagogically harmful excesses of text, reducing cognitive overloading and exploiting underused visual processing capacities. The experiments yielded unpredicted results, which indicates that the use of certain images can also prompt students to become active co-producers of knowledge.
Beyond the metropolis? Popular peace post-conflict peace
The debate on peacebuilding is deadlocked. Leading scholars of 'fourth generation' peacebuilding, who take Liberalism to task for creating what they ref in peacebuilding, have themselves been challenged by those they criticise for Liberal failure and failing themselves to produce the goods in terms of an al behind this debate, it seems that both approaches are asking the same ques stable, legitimate, sustainable peace be engineered? This article engages critica problem-solving social sciences. It proposes that the crises in orthodox peacebuilding are genuine, but there are approaches that might put fle generation concepts without bringing the Liberal edifice down, shifting the from ontology and ideology and returning it to the people i
OpenDemocracy: From liberal to popular peace?
Liberal peacebuilding fails because it is not liberal. Time to develop a new, more inclusive approach, argues David Roberts.
Saving liberal peacebuilding
Liberal peacebuilding has become the target of considerable criticism. Although much of this criticism is warranted, a number of scholars and commentators have come to the opinion that liberal peacebuilding is either fundamentally destructive, or illegitimate, or both. On close analysis, however, many of these critiques appear to be exaggerated or misdirected. At a time when the future of peacebuilding is uncertain, it is important to distinguish between justified and unjustified criticisms, and to promote a more balanced debate on the meaning, shortcomings and prospects of liberal peacebuilding
This article advances the idea of a ‘popular peace’ that refocuses liberal institution-building upon local, democratically determined priorities deriving from ‘everyday lives’, in addition to internationally favoured preferences (such as metropolitan courts and bureaucratic government). This is hypothesized to better confront the prevailing legitimacy lacuna, create social institutions around which a contract can evolve and generate the foundations upon which durable peacebuilding may grow.
This book is designed to support students and businesspeople engaging in commercial activities in postconflict spaces in ways that do not harm indigenous lives and livelihoods. It details the opportunities and challenges of such environments we can do much more to understand much more deeply, to increase the likelihood of equitable outcomes all round. Its author brings to the book a quarter of a century of experience living, working and researching in places as diverse as Cambodia and Sierra Leone
The peace people experience is determined by the processes privileged in peacebuilding. This book takes the position that the present approach is manipulated by elites and society and wastes the energies and opportunities involved. It then proposes alternatives which invoke the kind of peace people might seek in postconflict places if they had more control over the process of peacebuilding, a notion referred to here as ‘popular peace’.
TEDx Talk
On the subject of multimedia learning and how students benefit pedagogically and in terms of its engagement and disability inclusivity
Student-led article on MML
This article is concerned with the gap between how we teach International Relations and Politics (IR & P), and how students learn this subject at the physiological level. It discusses a 3-year trial of a visual pedagogy that better matches how we teach, to how our students live and learn.
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MML methods & affective, behavioural & cognitive engagement: a universal approach to dyslexia?
The article discusses a largely unexplored nexus between commonly compromised working memory in many dyslexic learners, on the one hand; on the other, the scientifically validated capacity of multimedia learning (MML) methods to ease pressure on working memory by exploiting visual processing capacity. The resulting data confirms that MML enhances engagement across each dimension to varying degrees, and that the key increases were not in the domain of cognitive engagement. Further, it shows that dyslexic learners’ engagement across the spectrum is greater when exposed to multimedia methods than monomedia.