Staff

Dr Jonathan Githens-Mazer, Co-Director

Jonathan first learned about the need for academics and public servants to support underprivileged minority communities from his parents and grandparents when growing up in Baltimore – like London a city with much wealth and more poverty and violence. He lived in a household where a sense of civic duty towards poor, victimised and less well educated neighbours was second nature. If it was his black neighbours who suffered most when Jonathan was growing up his grandparents came from Irish and Jewish immigrant families who had stories to tell themselves about their own experiences of oppression and disadvantage in Europe. For example, when still young Jonathan recalls how when watching a news report concerning Margaret Thatcher’s unyielding response to Bobby Sands’ hunger strike his grandmother was prompted to recount how in her youth she had heard stories from her own parents who vividly recounted being beaten by riding crops, wielded by Anglo-Irish landowners in Ireland who had utter distain for the local Irish population. That family story would give rise to Jonathan’s first research interest which culminated in a PhD awarded at the London School of Economics (LSE), subsequently published as Myths and Memories of the Easter Rising: Cultural and Political Nationalism in Ireland.

Jonathan's profile on guardian.co.uk

Dr Robert Lambert MBE, Co-Director

At the beginning of 2010 Robert was awarded a PhD for The London Partnerships: an Insider’s Analysis of Legitimacy and Effectiveness a dissertation which deals with partnerships between Muslim community groups and the Muslim Contact Unit (MCU), a police initiative in London. Until December 2007 Robert was a London police officer and the MCU was an initiative which he and a colleague conceived and undertook in the aftermath of 9/11. They described it as an antidote to the war on terror because it was a bottom-up grass roots project that ran counter to the global top-down military led ‘with us or against us’ approach adopted by George Bush and Tony Blair. Robert first learned about the benefits of police officers providing support for victimised minority communities from his grandfather who served in London’s Metropolitan Police from 1899 to 1924. Just as his grandfather saw Jewish and Irish Londoners unfairly stigmatised because they were wrongly conflated with terrorists so too did his father, a London printer and a British soldier, witness the outcome of sustained vilification of minorities when he entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to help rescue Jewish survivors at the end of the Second World War. Like many soldiers returning home to London from the horrors of the holocaust Robert's father was a staunch supporter of a post war reforming Labour government that set great store by social justice and support for the underprivileged.

Robert's profile on guardian.co.uk

Both authors retain the sense of social justice they learned from their parents and grandparents and a commitment to what they describe as community focused research that has clear policy ambitions.