The University of Leeds

Department Member, Sociology and Social Policy

Lecturer in Sociology, Deputy Director, Centre for Racism and Ethnicity Studies

About

ACADEMIC TRAJECTORY

I was appointed as lecturer in sociology at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds in 2007. Although my work connects to that of many research centres in Leeds, I initially joined the Centre for Racism and Ethnicity Studies (CERS), for which I acted as Deputy Director between 2007 and 2011. I am also member of other interdisciplinary international networks, including the Centre for Mobilities Research(CeMoRe, Sociology, Lancaster University) where I am appointed as honorary staff (Visiting Lecturer). Previously I held a lectureship in sociology at the University of Kent (2004-7), a Research Fellowship in criminology at the department of Applied Social Science, Lancaster University (2003-4), a temporary lectureship in European history at the University of Central Lancashire (2002) and a Research Fellowship in history at Lancaster University (2002).

TEACHING

My teaching experience spans many disciplines and subject areas (anthropology, media studies, sociology, history, criminology). Between 2007 and 2011 I convened and taught a master’s module on Race, Gender and Migration, which looked at the historical roots of migration and the relationship between racialisation, gendering and identity formation. In tandem, it explored contemporary theories of migration to examine how the structures underpinning migration are racialised and gendered, reinforcing inequalities and shaping identities. The module also took a close look at some of the cultural aspects of the phenomenon, with particular reference to representations of immigrants and migration in film, as well as types of mobility that could be explored within the same paradigm of human movement and settlement (tourism-induced migrations). This academic year I direct and teach a masters module on Globalization and International Social Change. From next year I will also be teaching my own second-year undergraduate module on Tourism and Culture, a comprehensive introduction to sociological debates on the cultural aspects of tourism through a variety of media.

RESEARCH TRAJECTORY & INTERESTS

I come from a culture that favours pedagogical fusions: my first degree was in history, archaeology and anthropology (School of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece). The School’s pedagogical training was interdisciplinary (including modules in education, philosophy, classics, theory and history of literature and foreign languages). From an early stage in my career I took interest in such fusions and used them to gain insight into the relational production of (national) identity. My MA (in Historical Research, Lancaster University), which combined the study of theory and method (see its recent organisation), further stimulated an interest in the ways culturally conditioned regimes of knowledge become powerful political tools in the institution of national identity. Having as focus a culture that has always been constructed by its significant political others as a buffer zone between East and West, I embarked on a doctoral study of Greece’s political trajectory both as a nation-state and a nation in flux. Initially I explored the interplay of mobility and fixity in nation building, with particular reference to nineteenth-century Anglo-Greek cultural encounters (my doctoral thesis was published by VDM in 2009 under the title The “Greece” of Britain and the “Britain” of Greece’). However, since 2004 my empirical focus began to expand, until I found myself engaged in an inquiry into global mediations of culture and identity.

Just like my undergraduate and postgraduate studies, my current research stands at a disciplinary crossroads. For some it could be described as a ‘political geography’ of identity, which has, nevertheless not lost it historical depth. But my increasing interest in the ways nationalism and cosmopolitanism (as political structures and as experiential discourses) become intertwined in a game of productive conflict, adds a strong political/social theory dimension to what I do. I would like to think of myself as a scholar with a broad interest in cultural and political globalization. At the same time, a long-standing interest in performance (as an art and a social practice) contests traditional social theory approaches that do no justice to the visual and artistic exploration of culture and identity. My first modest interdisciplinary statement was made in Nation-Building and Identity in Europe: The Dialogics of Reciprocity (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008). This book offers a provocative theorisation of nation-formation, focussing on the key role played by dialogic relations of hegemony, resistance and reciprocity in the coming-to-being of the modern nation. The workings of this dialogic relation between the emergent nation and its ‘Others’ is explored through encounters between Greece and Britain in latter years of the nineteenth century – one of the most notable instances of nation-formation played out within the heart of a ‘modern’, ‘civilised’ Europe, that traced its very origins in an imagined Hellenic civilisation. The analysis builds on (mainly American) anthropological tools to make a statement in support of a popular poetics of significance (a feminist discourse hidden underneath a political argument). Greece and the West served in more recent years as a pilot and a stepping stone into other global instances of cultural encounters.

One of the arguments the book purports relates to the disciplinary institution of knowledge (history, anthropology, archaeology and geography) through reciprocal and dialogical (Eastern and Western) ‘orientalisations’ of national culture. At the same time, the‘orientalisation’ of the nation-state through discourses of disorder and crime (a theme that reappears in my work on the rationale of contemporary terrorism and kidnapping) pushed Greece to the political margins of Europe. The modern Greek brand of ‘Orientalism’ assisted Greece’s various political patrons and the Greek nation-state to forge national citizenships that remain gendered and racialised to this day (an argument that also informs my work on contemporary migrations in Greece). The book is an attempt to highlight the importance of emotions in the study of belonging, especially where unequal relationships damage reciprocal political recognitions. The damage unleashes potent resentment that is directed both inwards (against national subjects) and outwards (against powerful states).

A global implementation of some ideas that informed Nation-Building and Identity in Europe guided my work on cinematic tourism. The Cinematic Tourist: Explorations in Globalization, Culture and Resistance (Routledge, 2007) is a case study-based analysis of tourism induced by the filming of locations around the world (Thailand, New Zealand, Greece, Italian history, ‘Cuba’). The book emerged out of self-contained essays (articles) I produced between 2002 and 2006. The analysis comprised audiences’ perceptions of film and their covert relationship with tourist advertising campaigns, alongside the nature of newly-born tourist industries and the reaction of native populations and nation-states faced with the commodification of their histories, identities and environments. The cosmopolitan clashes these glocal encounters constantly generate are both destructive (of imagined regional and national authenticities) and productive (of new, ‘staged’ and intersubjective versions of culture and identity). My study of cinematic tourism is on-going, placing emphasis on the ways global mediations (and new forms of media) amplify communicative possibilities and intercultural dialogue. It was written in support of the importance of research into popular culture, whose ‘seriousness’ under constant attack in conservative academic strongholds (see also collaborative research into film, ethnicity, crime and gender).

Orientalism’s chameleon nature has informed my study of expressions of national identity in sports (Euro 2004) and Olympic mega-events. I am particularly interested in entwined cosmopolitan and national narratives in the opening and closing ceremonies. Such artistic productions of nationalist discourses (the performative aspects of Olympism) develop alongside their technological counterpart (an Olympic cultural industry that aims to transform the host’s urban face), providing insight into the ways national citizenships remain gendered and racialised. The strategic feminisation and racialisation of national identity in the ceremonies stands poles apart from the socio-political realities of the Olympic project. For activist networks and the critics of the Olympic project the ceremonies’ ‘mediated’ cosmopolitanism harbours a performative contradiction, as it sanctions policies that erase (or demote) certain social identities from the nation-state. The multiculturalist ambiance of the Olympic mega-event symbolically resolves the crisis generated by the calls for national development through careful urban planning that violates human rights. Such ceremonial Self-narrations develop simultaneously in different expressive/visual modes, enabling the coexistence (and communication) of the ‘symbolic’ with the ‘material’ in an ‘allegorical imperative’. The gendered and racialised split between art and techne (as technology and architecture) as well as their impact on the national and global public spheres will become the focal point of a monograph on the mediated cosmopolitanisms promoted by the Olympic event.

An ongoing interest in intersectional dimensions of national and cosmopolitan belonging permeates my research on migration too (from the study of the migration of cultures and their artefacts, to that of contemporary migrations and their impact on national landscapes and people forced/compelled to move across space and cultures). This has an ethnographic touch that contests stringent methodological claims on social research. It views cosmopolitan encounters (of cultural viewpoints in abstracto and of their human manifestations in action) as experiential products that elude neat classification. Participant observation – loosely defined – comprises a less orthodox approach that has enabled me, thus far, to keep a fragmented diary of experiences and encounters (a pool of data I use in my writings). This form of ethnography (autobiographical and biographical at the same time) moves beyond the structured approach that informs Orientalist positivisms that turn a blind eye to the plurality of humanity’s gendered and racialised identities. A monograph under the title Cosmopolitan Memory in Europe’s “Backwaters”: Rethinking Civility debates the history of Western modernity through an exploration of notions of ‘national character’ in the context of creative industries (tourism, film, Internet).

‘National character’, all these material survivals and embodied mannerisms demarcating the uniqueness of national communities, often figures as an aspect of their heritage. But the theological rationale that survived the secularisation of Western societies continued to regard human nature’s gendered and sexualised property as fallible, condemning humans to repeat the Original Sin indefinitely. This book argues that contemporary understandings of ‘national character’ are driven by the same idea of human ‘fall’. This idea conditions responses to creative industries that publicise national authenticity globally. Hostility towards media and tourist reproductions of heritage communicates the national community’s determination to protect its uniqueness from trespassers and predators that may ‘steal’ or destroy its global image. This alleged ‘image theft’ conditions Greece’s heritage discourse that blames the destruction of the country’s European modernity on Ottoman Islam and Western countries alike. Other, non-Greek narratives of ‘character’ display the same attitude towards Islam, excluding it from the Western sphere of civility. However, Islam’s centrality to Western narratives of progress becomes evident in histories of industrial modernity on which many societies based their secularised notions of symbolic creativity and authenticity. The histories and futures of Northern Greek national character also informed my research funded by the British Academy ‘Reciprocal Orientalisms: Understanding Thessaloniki’s Past through Multiple Narrations’. This project has now transformed into an ethnographic investigation of everyday consumption practices that are rife with tourist and imaginative travel potential.

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