HCRI is delighted to welcome Dr Rubina Jasani and Dr Jenny Carson who join the institute as lecturers in humanitarianism and conflict response.

Rubina’s areas of interest are Anthropology of violence and reconstruction, Medical Anthropology with special focus on social suffering and mental illness and the study of lived Islam in South Asia and the UK. Her doctoral work examined moral and material ‘reconstruction’ of life after an episode of ethnic violence in Gujarat, Western India in 2002.

Working with survivors of ethnic violence, she became interested in mental illness and has completed two pieces of research on ethnicity and mental illness in inner city areas of Birmingham.

Currently, she is the qualitative lead on two inter-disciplinary research studies. The first study, aims to understand how people’s help-seeking is mediated by cultural, religious and social explanatory models. The second study aims to unpack the concept of ‘institutional racism’ by monitoring the over-representation of ethnic minorities in compulsory psychiatric care.

At HCRI, she aims to pursue further research in the areas of Conflict, Culture and Mental Health.

Jenny completed her PhD at the University of Manchester in 2009 and has been working as a Research Associate at HCRI since February 2010. We’re delighted that Jenny has now joined us more formally as a Lecturer in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response and as the HCRI MA Director.

 

Jenny’s research focuses on the humanitarian assistance provided to refugees and displaced persons (DP) since 1945, with special reference to the work of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). One element of my work, focusing on Quaker responses to DP nationalism in camps in Germany after World War 2, appears in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945-1950, eds. Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (2009).