Girton Advocates for Social Justice

Ashna Devaprasad, MPhil Criminology Student

Criminal behaviour, victimisation and punishment in India

As of 2023, India is part of 0.28% of countries that still retain the death penalty. According to available statistics, more than 75% of death row prisoners in India belong to socioeconomically marginalised communities or religious and caste minorities. A disproportionate number of these prisoners suffer from mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities, implying that they should not have been sentenced to death in the first place. Over the years, scholars have raised several concerns about biases and systemic problems within the existing capital punishment framework. Despite judges acknowledging these concerns — rampant police corruption, faulty evidence, gross prosecutorial misconduct, poor legal representation and judicial error — courts continue to sentence individuals to death. Consequently, less than 5% of death sentences imposed by lower courts are confirmed up the judicial ladder, and nearly 35% end in exonerations.

Today, hundreds of death row prisoners continue to languish in prison for prolonged periods, their lives disrupted, separated from their families, and traumatised every day by a lingering fear of impending death. My MPhil research qualitatively examines lower court capital punishment decisions in India to understand the role of judicial discourse in skewing public perceptions of criminal behaviour, victimisation and punishment. Through my research, I hope to challenge excessively punitive practices and argue for reforms that enable the criminal justice system to pursue more humane, reformative and empathic sentencing policies.

• Project 39a Annual Statistics 2020
• Project 39a Annual Statistics 2021
• Project 39a Death Penalty Sentencing In India's Trial Courts

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Meg Margetts, 6^th Year Medical Student

Mapping the healthcare pathway for people experiencing homelessness in Cambridge

People experiencing homelessness are suffering over-proportionally from health issues leading to substantially reduced life expectancy. In this long-term ethnographic research project in Cambridge, we are mapping barriers to access healthcare for people experiencing homelessness in Cambridge. We ask: which kinds of healthcare can people experiencing homelessness not access? Why? Which groups are particularly affected? In Phase 1 of the project, we interviewed a large variety of stakeholders (service providers, healthcare professionals, policy makers) and people experiencing homelessness and with lived experience; we also shadowed several healthcare service providers to collect in-depth ethnographic data. We are currently focusing on phase 2 where we are taking a deep dive to look into the experiences of women and LGBTQ+

• Cambridge Homelessness Impact and Research Network (CHIRN)
• Lenhard J, Margetts M, Meng E. 'Of not passing: homelessness, addiction, mental health and care during COVID-19', Medical Humanities (Online, 2022)

 

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Ebony Owusu-Nepaul, MPhil Sociology Student

The portrayal of Black women in UK media

In a society where the media is a powerful mechanism in producing social change, through the creation and spreading of knowledge, how the media is utilised has immense power in altering and forming the way we think about and view others within society. Arguably the media allows notions of class, age, gender, and ethnicity to spread faster than ever whether these are inaccurate or accurate. My research focuses on the portrayal of Black women throughout modern UK media and how this ultimately effects their everyday lives. In an ever-changing society and particularly with digital media and technology at our disposal it is important to delve in, unpack and challenge dated narratives that surround social groups, particularly Black women.

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Jesse Ng, PhD English Student

Recalibrating Hong Kong’s Socially Engaged Arts and Literature

My PhD focuses on the art and literature produced during the 2019-2020 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (anti-ELAB) movement. Many of these protest materials use strong emotions and references to popular culture and the western canon including The Hunger Games, Japanese anime and paintings by Eugène Delacroix to satirise the current regime, promote the pro-democracy cause and attract solidarity from international communities. My project assesses how effective they are in achieving their goals, how they add to the narrative of Hong Kong’s cultural identity and continue to influence the dynamics of other protests in the world. I am interested in the role art and literature play in decolonising the mind of a people, who because of their distinct socio-historical backgrounds can construe concepts such as freedom, democracy, colonialism, and cosmopolitanism differently from other postcolonial communities. This is particularly relevant to the complex background of Hong Kong as an ex-British colony, international financial city and a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. Pushing against monolithic understanding of social justice, my project uses the Hong Kong protests as a method to reflect on what resisting hegemony means today.

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Jack Rich, Undergraduate Systems Biology Student

Modelling the spread of fungicide resistance

As the Earth’s population grows and its climate changes, it is becoming clear our food systems are subject to ever increasing stresses. Moreover, eliminating food poverty, and ensuring generational food security are highly important for the delivery of social justice. Every year in the UK, fungal diseases of wheat present a significant risk to crop yield and grain quality, directly impacting the economy. Disease control is threated by the overuse of fungicides contributing to fungal crop pathogens rapidly evolving fungicide resistance.

My Masters research project, supervised by Girton fellow Prof Nik Cunniffe, aims to understand the spatial spread of fungicide resistance, through epidemiological modelling. Developing our theoretical understanding of what factors increase or slow down the rate of fungicide resistance evolution, can guide policies to encourage sustainable grower behaviours, reducing the risks to vulnerable groups within society.

Globally, wheat is a vitally important commodity crop for communities across the world. Other research at Cambridge is delivering social justice through international development by advancing decision support systems to automatically predict fungal wheat disease risk for developing nations.

If you are interested to read more on this topic, as an additional way to engage with my research interests, I maintain a webpage where I post articles I have written, including interviews and updates on my research projects.

 

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Lena Voelk, MPhil Middle Eastern Studies Student

Screening Women at War - Power and Identity in the Israeli Military

Gender biases are heavily reliant on and can partly be constructed by popular media such as cinema. The portrayal of women in male-dominated spheres, such as the military, can thus impact a state's collective memory and cultural narratives.

When it comes to female soldiers in Israeli films, they are often presented as either being scared and unfit for military service or helpless and needing male protection, not acknowledging their agency and involvement in the military sphere. This underlines the ambivalent relationship and power imbalances of women in the military and within the collective narrative of Israeli society. By combining these observations and the theoretical framework of collective memory and identity politics, the findings will allow us better to understand the difficulty of overlapping identities in Israeli society and address gender injustices in a military context.

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Dr Stuart Davis, Deputy Senior Tutor and Jean Sybil Dannatt Official Fellow

The role of literature and cinema in conveying emotional impact

In recent years, the Spanish people have been grappling with the legacy of a brutal civil war that tore the country apart in the late 1930s. Still today, these later generations seek justice for those who suffered or died without proper burial because they were on the losing side of the conflict. In the twenty-first century, literature and cinema have played an important role in telling stories, many based in testimonies, that provide a voice to the unspoken victims and allow us access to their experiences. In my research I have explored the techniques that recent novels have used to convey emotional impact and most recently have examined the film Parallel Mothers, from the internationally renowned director Pedro Almodóvar.

• Reading Beyond Cognitive Meaning: Affective Strategies in Novels of the Spanish ‘Memory Boom’

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Dr Michael Degani, Juliet Campbell Official Fellow

Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania

Electricity is expensive and unreliable in the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In my book The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Posticialist Tanzania, I show how that came to be, how ordinary residents cope with this problem, and how it has given rise to certain political attitudes. Some of my research was historical, looking into how politicians introduced private competition into the state-run power sector in the 1990s. But as an anthropologist, I mostly conducted ethnographic fieldwork, which means spending time in a community, learning their language, and just generally seeing what they get up to. For a while I rode around with utility employees that disconnected households for not paying their power bills, and observed all the arguments, tears and accusations that unfolded when the wires got cut. I also spent time with out-of-work electricians and households who illegally pirated current (often after getting disconnected!). I paid attention to the often-sophisticated ways they justified these practices, or justified some of them and not others. Ultimately, I tried to show the creative ways residents in a largely poor metropolis in East Africa made their lives work despite widespread infrastructural disrepair and all the injustices that follow in its wake.

• The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania

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Dr Amy Donovan, Official Fellow

Disasters are fundamentally the result of social injustices

Forty years of research have shown that natural hazards disproportionately affect those who are poor, least empowered and most marginalised. Where risk reduction takes place at all, governments typically take technocratic approaches to understanding and managing risk, rather than understanding the needs and complexities of communities. Scientific knowledge of natural hazards is advanced, but there remain large uncertainties and there are huge challenges in ensuring that knowledge is used where it is most needed – many developing countries lack the resources to monitor volcanoes or install early warning systems for floods and cyclones, for example. My research seeks to understand the integration of different kinds of knowledges – including those of local communities – in reducing risk. It involves working with those at risk – often those most marginalised in society – and with scientists to promote risk reduction across cultural, social and institutional divides, primarily in volcanic areas that are experiencing rapid environmental changes. Current projects are based in Latin America, DPR Korea, South Asia and East Africa.

• Imagine
• Dr Donovan's profile on University of Cambridge, Geography Department
• The Mt. Paektu Research Centre

 

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Dr Evelina Gambino, Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography

Infrastructures for a different world?

A State in A State is an experimental documentary film directed by Tekla Aslanishvili and written in collaboration with Dr Evelina Gambino. The film pieces together fragments of stories narrated by those who live and work in and around the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK), a railway that crosses the South Caucasus. Railways are usually understood to connect people and places, yet, since its construction, the BTK has created new divisions. Built at a time when new borders were emerging across the territories of the former Soviet Union, this train has played an important role in sanctioning political and economic divisions between the newly emerged republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The film maps the geopolitical rivalries that this railway has materialised, but it also unearths a more uplifting story inscribed on the BTK’s tracks. This is the story of the workers who built and operated many of the trains that crossed the Soviet Union and of their memories of the transnational friendships that bound them together through hard times. Even in a world like today’s, where workers have lost much of their power, these memories not only remain a powerful testimony of the acts of solidarity that populated rail networks, but also provide the foundation on which to build forms of solidarity in the present.

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Professor Mia Gray, Supernumerary Fellow

Falling through the social safety net - The welfare state in tatters

As families across the country struggle with the rising cost of living our research reflects back on the impacts of past decade of welfare changes and local austerity cuts. The last decade of austerity in the UK had disastrous personal, social, health, and economic impacts - which systematically hit the poorest people and places the hardest.

Our new research paper (The tattered state: Falling through the social safety net) details how austerity cuts have substantially altered the role of the state. In particular, welfare reform has qualitatively changed welfare. The move towards digital and automated provision – accelerated with the move to Universal Credit – shifts how people access support, and how they are treated during this process. Great Yarmouth, located on the Norfolk coast in the East of England, was the first poor urban setting to have the new welfare package - Universal Credit - rolled out. Our study shows how the rigid rules and requirements of the new welfare system worsened lives for many already on low incomes.

• The tattered state: Falling through the social safety net - ScienceDirect

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Dr Hilary Marlow, Vice-Mistress and Official Fellow

Hearing the call of the poor and the call of the earth

Environmental issues are a major global concern, but what might motivate people to change their behaviours? My research focuses on environmental ethics and the ways in which religious texts, in particular the Hebrew Bible, might inform and critique our responses to the planetary crisis. My current project examines the biblical Book of Amos (8th Century BCE), in which the prophet Amos roundly condemns the rich and powerful of his society for exploiting the poor. It explores the role that the physical environment, ‘the land’, plays in this critique and asks how this contributes to and supports the prophet’s call for justice. The Book of Amos is just one of many examples in the Hebrew Bible that highlight the inextricable connection between social and environmental justice and is a telling reminder that we have an ethical responsibility, in the words of Pope Francis, to hear ‘the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’.

Here's a link to a collection of essays I co-edited:

• The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and Ecology

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