News

We are excited that Dr Nyi Nyi Kyaw recently joined the Relational Harm project. Nyi Nyi’s project will examine relational harm among intergenerational Rohingya families displaced across successive waves of exodus since the late 1970s, with particular attention to the post-2017 genocide wave and to how family relationships have been strained, severed, or sustained across borders and generations. The study employs a qualitative, biographical approach built around three complem

We are excited to introduce Darcy Gresham who recently joined the Relational Harm project as a PhD student, supervised by Dr Rebekka Friedman and Professor Juliette Pattinson. Darcy’s research focuses on a historical instance of familial separation, in the case of British children forcibly migrated to Australia. With particular focus on the impact of the Second World War, her work will focus on the movement and labour of children from 1930s, in the build-up to global war wher

Our first articles were published from our Special Issue on ‘Forced Separation’ with the International Journal of Human Rights. The special issue is coedited by Rebekka Friedman, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and Diana Florez. This interdisciplinary collection examines the extent to which forced family separation can be seen as a distinct and freestanding harm. It covers a range of cases of family separation, including enforced disappearances; child taking; slavery; and contexts of mig

Recently, some of the Relational Harm team attended the 2026 Journal of Disappearance Studies conference at INCORE, Ulster University. It was an intense but rewarding three days filled with presentations from researchers, practitioners and artists, as well as film screenings, exhibitions, a play and a moving presentation from families of the disappeared in Northern Ireland. The team put together the panel ‘Gender and Minority Harms’ alongside Liz Barnert and Chulani Kodikara.

On Thursday 2 July 2026, the team participated in the Multidisciplinary Trauma-Centred Symposium organised by the King’s Trauma-Centred Study Group. Dr Rebekka Friedman spoke on the panel on Vicarious Trauma in Researchers, with her contribution titled Researching Ambiguous and Unresolved Loss, and Dr Zala Pochat Križaj on the panel Reading and Writing Trauma, looking at Narratives of war: silences and minimisation of traumatic experiences in archives. It has been a delight t

We are excited that Dr Phoebe Martin and Dr Yajna Sanguhan recently joined the Relational Harm project. On the project, Phoebe's work will focus on gendered understandings of relational harm, and the Peruvian case study. Initially she will be working on using a reproductive justice framework to consider the impacts of enforced disappearance on parents and children. This draws on her previous research on reproductive justice in Peru which looked at feminist activism relating t

Stipend-only funding opportunity over three years to start in September 2026. We are delighted to announce a three-year funded PhD studentship for a PhD student to join our ERC project. The proposed PhD thesis should focus on a historical case of family separation and/or reunification during the First or Second World War (including the period immediately after). Interested candidates should email their application materials to Dr Rebekka Friedman by 1 March 2026. The successf