I have recently successfully defended my ESRC funded PhD: ‘Peace as an Event; Peace as Utopia: Chasing Peace in Mindanao’ under the supervision of Professors Leon Tikly and Roger Dale at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, where I am a member of the research centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies. My current research seeks to release peace from the violence of closure into an open-ended promise. This is informed by Derrida’s work on the event, most famously on justice, and Bloch’s realm of the Not Yet, which together combine to create a poetic space which seeks to destabilise fixed ideas and open up alternative thinking.
Taking a broadly ethnographic approach, and incorporating arts-based methods, has allowed me to explore a ruptured and multifarious understanding of peace in Mindanao, in order to attempt the difficult task of locating my research in the spaces between the signifier ‘peace’ and the event peace.
My research interests have been informed by my previous experiences as a Primary School teacher in the UK, after qualifying in Geography and Education at the University of Reading, and later teaching at an International School in Mindanao, The Philippines. My time teaching in Mindanao was the catalyst of this research, motivating me to start postgraduate research in Education and Development. After obtaining a Masters degree in Education and Development from the University of Bristol with a dissertation on ‘The Role for Peace Education with Reference to the Mindanao Conflict, the Philippines’, I completed a Masters degree in Research Methods focusing on ‘The Critical Analysis of Discourses Evident in Education in Post-Genocide Rwanda’ in preparation for my PhD research.
The purpose of this website is to provide further information about my research, including conference papers.
