Our team is growing!

Dr. Phoebe Martin and Dr. Yajna Sanguhan recently started working on the project as postdoctoral researcher associates.

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 to abortion and forced sterilisations. In the second year of the project, she will be carrying out fieldwork in Ayacucho, Peru, where she plans to look at the disappearance of children during the Internal Armed Conflict (1980-2000). During the IAC, thousands of people were disappeared, primarily in Ayacucho, with over 20,000 still remaining unaccounted for today. Within that total, hundreds of children were disappeared, but their stories have not yet been explored in the wider disappearance literature.

Yajna’s research will focus on enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka and globally. In Sri Lanka, Yajna will be conducting fieldwork to understand the ongoing harm to Tamil relatives of the disappeared as they continue to demand the truth from the government, over a decade after the end of the civil war. Enforced disappearances has been a marked tool of the state, leaving Sri Lanka to have the second-highest number of enforced disappearances in the world. Her research seeks to examine the long-term impact of enforced disappearances to the household within the broader context of a lack of accountability from the state, and structural harm to the Tamil community. Yajna is also mapping enforced disappearances globally by tracking and analysing available cross-country and individual case-level datasets. Data on enforced disappearances is scarce and often hidden, and this will be a novel attempt to collate data from across the world.

You can find out more about the team here.