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Prof. Nick Vaughan-Williams Awarded Prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize
Nick Vaughan-Williams, Professor of International Security and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize worth £100,000.00 by The Leverhulme Trust.
Philip Leverhulme Prizes recognise the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is judged to be exceptionally promising. Each year the scheme awards up to thirty Prizes across a range of disciplines and in 2015 the selected subject areas are: Classics, Earth Sciences, Physics, Politics and International Relations, Psychology, and Visual and Performing Arts.
The Prize is in recognition of Nick’s research at the intersection of international security and border studies. Drawing together his long-standing interest in the international politics of border security with more recent work on vernacular theories of security threats, he will use the Prize to launch a new three-year project (2016-19) entitled ‘Everyday narratives of European border security and insecurity’.
The project will investigate how European citizens narrate their own experiences and understandings of border security and insecurity against the backdrop of the on-going Mediterranean migration and refugee crisis. In-depth critical focus group research across major cities affected by the crisis – with groups varied according to age, ethnicity, socio-economic background, religion, and gender – will generate rich qualitative insights into how diverse publics make sense of the crisis, the kinds of stories they tell about how it affects their own lives and others’ including migrants and refugees, and the impact of EU border security and migration management policies and practices on ‘regular’ populations.
Aside from several scholarly outputs including a research monograph, the Prize will generate an open access data archive of vernacular theories of everyday border security and insecurity, and research findings will be disseminated via a bespoke project website, targeted media interventions, and engagement with end-users (citizens, migrant and refugee activist groups, governments, the EU Commission, and media) throughout the lifecycle of the research.
Further information about the Philip Leverhulme Prize can be found here: https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/funding/grant-schemes/philip-leverhulme-prizes