About
Over the past four decades I have worked as a writer, photo-journalist, environmental designer and academic.
Since 1992 I have taught sociology, cultural geography and women's/gender studies 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 writing has focused mainly on the politics of gender and race, the social construction of whiteness, anti-racist feminism, colonial history, national identity, militarisation, the cultural heritage of war, the politics of place, and ecological thought.
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 Tate Britain, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Goldsmiths University, Broadway Theatre, Catford, Rugby Art Gallery and Museum and The New Cross Fire Momentum 1981 Survivors, currently on view at Goldsmiths.
My work was included in an exhibition at Atlas Gallery entitled The Black Triangle: Photography from the Civil Rights and Anti-Racist Movements in the UK, US and South Africa, October 6-November 26, 2022. (see also here).
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 some recent examples there too.
I also serve as a co-opted member of the Peace and Security Committee at the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and as an Advisor to Declassified UK.
You can contact me on: answersinthesoil@gmail.com and find me on Twitter at @vronsta. I am also on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/vronsta/