Today's middle ground seems to be less ‘on point’ and an unfashionable place to be, the echo chamber effect of polarised thinking, in this bumper year of elections, gives us time to pause and reflect on where we have arrived after a worldwide pandemic. Our world is getting far more violent: conflict event rates have increased by over 40% from 2020 through 2023; and increased 12% in 2023 from 2022 rates (ACLED 2024). We have scattered, fragmented spaces where an open constructive global dialogue could be undertaken. These spaces are in short supply for young people across the world, who have constrained access to alternative narratives, histories, and writing. We risk the erasure of such spaces for our youth as each generation that passes takes with it memory, wisdom and note keeping of the middle ground. This talk discusses how this middle ground is key to addressing global challenges and explores how we could hold on to this shrinking space.

Speaker Biography

Neelam Raina
Middlesex University, United Kingdom

Dr Neelam Raina is an Associate Professor of Design and Development at Middlesex University, London. Her research interests include conflict, security, peace building, material cultures, gender, and livelihood generation in fragile, conflict affected states. Raina’s work explores notions of healing, trauma, peace and reflection through the embodied practices of making, using material culture and tacit knowledge as the underpinning for approaching violence and peace building and for sustainable income generation. Raina is a post conflict reconstruction expert with a focus on South Asia where she has conducted extensive empirical research over the last two decades. The Women, Peace and Security agenda is key to Neelam’s and her research seeks to foreground voices of vulnerable and marginalised women.

Dr Raina has led several large-scale competitively funded research projects which examine material and social practices through which Muslim women in conflict areas reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis, and through which the social relations and material bases of capitalism are renewed. Her work allows connections to be built between, creative home-based workers who are largely seen as peripheral, to development economics, and on the fringes of formal employment and contributors to GDP; to the larger notions of peace building, countering and preventing violent extremism, poverty spirals and conflict theory through culturally significant, socially relevant practices. She connects the British creative industry into solution-based impactful approaches to global challenges through research.

Raina is a strong advocate for Afghan women and is the Director of the Secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Afghan women and girls in UK parliament. Her research in Afghanistan is ongoing as she brings women’s tacit knowledge to commercially viable spaces from the confines of the home.

Raina has a PhD in Design and Development, and a Master’s in Design and Manufacture from De Montfort University, Leicester. From 2018-2021, she was the Challenge Leader for UKRI’s Conflict and Security Portfolio for the Global Challenges Research Fund. Raina has been a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security. She is the editor for the International Journal of Traditional Arts, and her new work Creative Economies of Culture in South Asia – Performers and Craftspeople was published in 2021.

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Neelam Raina is an Associate Professor of Design and Development at Middlesex University, London.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule

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