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).
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.
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/