Under Construction @ Keele 2017 Under Construction @ Keele Vol. III (3) | Page 66

Notes on Contributors
SAMUEL D. HOLDER is a PhD candidate in Law at Keele University. His research project
seeks to trace the emancipatory potential of International Human Rights Law using,
primarily, the methodology of Foucauldian genealogy. Public international law, and its most
powerful normative concept, sovereignty, helped manufacture a distinct brand of freedom
and equality in the rollout of IHRL, which, until today, is evidenced by the emergence
primarily of breaches of, rather than adherence to, IHRL. The goal of this thesis is to
investigate along the two discursive vectors of normalisation and reification, to show that the
persistence and sturdiness of IHRL practices and processes, which appear otherwise natural
and eternal, are in fact both potentially disruptable and urgently in need of transformation.
EMMA HARRISON is a first year PhD student in the School of Psychology at Keele
University. She has previously gained a first-class BSc, and an MSc with distinction, at the
University of Chester. At the moment, she is in the initial phase of her research project,
which is conducting physical and online focus groups with UK university students in order to
explore their perceptions of bullying on campus. She hopes to use this data as a basis for
creating a scale which will measure a broad range of relevant bullying behaviour, and then
she aims to recruit students from around the UK to gain a clearer picture of the prevalence
and consequences of bullying at this level of education.
NICHOLAS DAVID SHELDON has worked as a part-time lecturer and tutor in the further and
higher education sectors, where he designed and taught courses including Psychology,
Robotics, Computer Science and Electronics. Having completed a Master’s degree in
Philosophy, he is now pursuing a full-time PhD in Philosophy at Keele while completing his
fourth Bachelor’s degree with the Open University. Nick is married with two children, one of
whom graduated from Keele last summer with a First in Criminology.
SAMUEL TAYLOR is currently completing a MRes in History at Keele University. His
research investigates the role of women who campaigned for John F. Kennedy's presidential
campaign and Terry Sanford's gubernatorial campaign in North Carolina and examines how
many of these activists later influenced the policies of the respective administrations. A
particular emphasis will be placed on the Commissions on the Status of Women established
by Kennedy in 1961 and Sanford in 1963, which had been championed by many women's
rights groups as a way of both studying the barriers preventing equality and countering
popular demands for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. This will show that
women's rights activism existed long before scholars have typically argued and reconsider
how women began to support, challenge, and become leaders in male-dominated politics.
GEORGE BLAKE is in the process of completing his MRes in Humanities. His current
project examines systems of meaning production within comics, comics’ place within
academic study, limits of comics study and comics’ place within wider cultural studies. His
work is specifically focussed on three texts: IKEA’s MALM, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and
Lorenzo Ghetti’s To Be Continued.