- Research Staff
- This person is no longer active in the department.
Research
I joined the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre in December 2020 to work on expanding and utilising the data being collected from online extremist sources. For the past decade I have been working on motivations for and pathways to joining extremist organisations, mostly using field-based techniques in a multi-disciplinary team of psychologists and anthropologists. My role in this research was to interview extremists, ex-extremists, and non-extremist fighters all over the world, from the front line in Iraq to prisons to homes. Now my attention is shifting to these same motivations but expressed online, and broadening the collaborations of the centre to academics and other researchers working on extremism.
For the past 4 years, I have worked extensively as a consultant in Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE), for clients ranging from UN agencies (UNDP, UNICEF, UN Women, UN University) and governments (UK, USA, Tunisia, Jordan, Australia) and NGOs and think tanks, and am working on a book to do with this industry and the manufactured expertise on which it relies.
I edit the Cambridge Literary Review and am a contributing editor and staff writer at Newlines Magazine.