About
After starting out as a journalist and photographer, I have taught cultural geography, gender studies and sociology at universities in the UK and US.
I am currently a visiting professor at the Dept of Gender Studes, LSE.
My lifelong project has addressed the politics of gender and race, colonial history, national identity, militarism, peace, the cultural heritage of war, 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). More recently, Return of a Native: learning from the land (Repeater 2022), brings a lot of these themes together in a forensic investigation of rural England; and England's Military Heartland: preparing for war on Salisbury Plain, co-authored with Antonia Dawes, Mitra Patriyar and Alice Cree (MUP 2025) offers a portrait of the huge British Army base nearby.
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, including Uprising, directed for the BBC by Steve McQueen and James Rogan (2022), 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); The Photographers Gallery, London (2024) and Turner Contemporary (Resistance 2025).
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.
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.
Contact details: answersinthesoil@gmail.com and https://www.instagram.com/vronsta/