Dr. Eolene Boyd-Macillan, PhD, is a social psychologist working within the framework of public mental health promotion to develop and test community-based interventions that increase self-regulation, resilience and social cohesion and reduce destructive social polarisation and inequalities. She is Senior Research Associate and Co-Director of IC Research, Cambridge Public Health, University of Cambridge. Her research includes populations living with legacies associated with historic migration events alongside opportunities and challenges linked to current migration and displacement due to political, economic and environmental crises. She is a lead expert on the EC Efus BRIDGE project seeking to address destructive social polarisation across thirteen municipalities in seven countries and supervisor of a new intervention for young people and those working with them in Sweden. She co-founded the IC-ADAPT Consortium with Prof Valerie DeMarinis, Dr Maria Nordendahl, Prof Derrick Silove, Dr Alvin Tay, hosted by Cambridge. Integrating two evidence-based models, IC-ADAPT bridges individuals/ family groups and structures/ systems through a community focus.
Mark Sedgwick has a PhD in the history of Islam from the University of Bergen and is professor of Arab and Islamic Studies in the Department of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University. He previously taught for many years at the American University in Cairo. He works on a variety of topics including Islamic modernism, terrorism, and Salafism, and on Muslims in the West; he also works on the ideology of the Western Far Right and on theoretical issues.
His “Anti-Colonial Terrorism: Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood to 1954” is about to be published in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism, and his recent publications include an edited collection, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). One of his best-known articles is “The Concept of Radicalization as a Source of Confusion,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22 (2010).
Prof Valerie DeMarinis, PhD (psychology) is Senior Professor in Public Mental Health at the Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine at Umeå University, Sweden; Professor of Public Mental Health Promotion at Innlandet Hospital Trust, Norway; and Emeritus Professor in Psychology of Religion and Cultural Psychology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research areas include refugee mental health, cultural information in treatment, public mental health and violent extremism. Recent/current research programs include: Director of the Wellbeing and Health section of the nationally-funded IMPACT research programme/Centre of Excellence at Uppsala University; Primary Mental Health Analyst for the EU- Horizon 2020 project RESPOND: Governance of Migration; and, PI for both Swedish and Norwegian projects on medical communication efficacy of the Cultural Formulation Interview (DSM-5). Her applied research and clinical work includes a focus on radicalisation and preventing violent extremism as a public mental health concern, including with young people who have been involved with either white-power extremism or Islamist extremism.
Over the last two decades, I have been studying the impacts of risk on everyday life across a range of domains, including national security, crime, politics, welfare, work, the environment and consumption. During the course of my career, I have been keen to explore the ways in which social dangers are socially constructed and symbolically represented, how risks are perceived by different cultural groups, the ways in which risks are politically managed and the modes of regulation deployed by government and criminal justice agencies seeking to control risks.
My research lies at the intersection between Sociology and Criminology and is oriented toward the relationship between risk, security and control. In recent years I have been researching the social construction of the terrorist threat and the political effects of counter-terrorism legislation on Muslim Minority groups. This strand of my work is currently being augmented by a critical study into the nature, representation and regulation of radicalization.
I am also working alongside colleagues Sandra Walklate and Ross McGarry on a range of projects exploring the concept of resilience and its applications in military and security contexts. The third strand of my research is oriented toward the changing nature of the victim in society and the relationship between understandings of victimization, fear of crime and wider processes of securitization. My final long-standing research interest revolves around the theoretical uses of risk and the limits to risk theory. Consequent to my critique of the risk society thesis, I continue to explore the possibility of developing inter-disciplinary synergistic theories of risk within the social sciences.
I have established an international reputation in the field of risk research, delivering lectures and papers in Europe, North America, South America, Asia and Oceania. I have authored several books on risk and my work is published in a range of high impact social science journals including the British Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Criminology, Sociology, Sociological Review and Security Dialogue