About
Over the past four decades I have lived as a writer, photo-journalist, environmental designer, academic and sometime artist.
My lifelong project addresses the politics of gender and race, the social construction of whiteness, anti-racist feminism, colonial history, national identity, war, militarisation, social ecology and cultural geography.
Since 1992 I have taught at Greenwich University, Yale and Kingston University; I was also a research fellow at the Open University for seven years. I am currently a visiting professor at the Dept of Gender Studes, LSE.
My books include Beyond the Pale: white women, racism and history (Verso 1992/2015); Out of Whiteness: color, politics and culture (Chicago 2002), co-authored with Les Back); Who Cares about Britishness? (Arcadia 2007); and Military Migrants: Fighting for YOUR Country (Palgrave 2012). My latest book, Return of a Native: learning from the land (Repeater 2022), brings a lot of these themes together in a forensic investigation of rural England.
I have made most of my other published work available on the archive page.
My documentary photographs from 1977-1983 have been used in TV documentaries and dramas, as well as featuring in exhibitions at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; Goldsmiths University; Broadway Theatre, Catford; Rugby Art Gallery and Museum; The New Cross Fire Momentum 1981 Survivors; Tate Britain (Life Between Islands 2020-1); Café Royal Books, the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol (2022); Atlas Gallery The Black Triangle: Photography from the Civil Rights and Anti-Racist Movements in the UK, US and South Africa (2022); Stills: Centre for Photography, Edinburgh (2023); Ottowa Art Gallery (Life Between Islands 2024) and The Photographers Gallery, London (2024).
For more information about my images of the Black People's Day of Action, please see Autograph ABP.
There's a small selection on the photography page so please contact me if you would like to see more.
These days I use my camera as a notebook for thinking and writing and there are some recent examples there too.
From 2017-2023 I was a co-opted member of the Peace and Security Committee at the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. I am currently an Advisor at Declassified UK.
You can contact me on: answersinthesoil@gmail.com and find me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/vronsta/