Gisli Vogler

Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences

Contact details

Address

Street

Centre for Open Learning
Paterson's Land

City
Holyrood Rd
Post code
Edinburgh EH8 8AQ

Biography

Background

I am a teaching fellow and Course Organiser in the social sciences at the Centre for Open Learning, University of Edinburgh and associate lecturer in the social sciences at The Open University.

I completed a PhD at Edinburgh in 2019 as part of the ERC-funded project “Illuminating the ‘Grey Zone’: Addressing Complex Complicity in Human Rights Violations.”

CV

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Undergraduate teaching

I have extensive teaching experience across undergraduate and foundation courses in sociology, political science and interdisciplinary social sciences. I enjoy teaching a wide variety of different topics using my conceptual lens and interests in disciplines spanning psychology, politics, history, and sociology. I have also gained extensive experience of quality assurance processes as course organizer overseeing around 30 courses across the social sciences and as acting head of social sciences (2023) at the Centre for Open Learning.

I currently teach sociology courses as part of the Centre for Open Learning's short courses programme open to all adults, politics on the international foundation programme for international students, sociology as part of the Edinburgh University summer school, and interdisciplinary social sciences as part of the access programme for adult returners to education.

 

 

Research summary

My research lies at the intersection of sociology with political and critical theory.

In my thesis I contributed to debates on complicity and responsibility for systemic injustice and violence, for example state sponsored violence, the destruction of the environment, or sweatshop labour. I asked how can and should people judge their entanglement in injustice and violence and developed a framework using the influential insights on political judgement by political theorist Hannah Arendt and on British sociologist Margaret Archer’s theory of social conditioning and change. I have since refined the approach and published it with Edinburgh University Press.

My current research studies how the disability community inverts and subverts dominant ways of thinking and knowing to articulate a more just, free and equal society inclusive of disabled people. For a theoretical framework I engage with disability studies, relational sociology and the relational turn in the social sciences and humanities, utopian studies, social movement literature, feminist, critical theory and postcolonial literature. Alongside this project, I have published conceptual work on political judgement, power, complicity and resistance.

 

Publication

Books

(2024) Judging Complicity: How to Respond to Injustice and Violence. Edinburgh University Press. (launch discount code NEW30 for 30% off)

 

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

(2024) Acting as if: The Utopian Political Thought and Actions of the US Disability Rights Movement. Contemporary Political Theory (online first).

(2021) Bridging the Gap between Affect and Reason: On Thinking-Feeling in Politics. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (online first).

(2021) Enriching Responsiveness to Complicity through a Disposition towards World-in-Formation. Arendt Studies (online first.

(2021) A Critical Realist Contribution to Debates on Complicity in Systemic Injustice and Violence. Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory (online first).

(2020) The Ambiguity of Subversion: Resistance through Radio Broadcasting. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 67(165), 65-91. https://doi.org/10.3167/th.2020.6716504

(2019) Arendt and Political Realism – Towards a Realist Account of Political Judgement Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (online first). Co-authored with Demetris Tillyris.

(2016) Power between Habitus and Reflexivity: Introducing Margaret Archer into the Power Debate. Journal of Political Power, 9(1), 65-82.

 

Other Publications

(2024) Responding to Failure: The Case of the US Disability Rights Movement. In: MM & AZ (eds.) Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis. New York, NY: Routledge.

Interview with leading US Disability Activist Judy Heumann, Exchanges, 2020, Centre for Ethics and Critical Thought, University of Edinburgh (https://critique.sps.ed.ac.uk/being-heumann/)

Collaborative Research Project on De-colonising the Social Sciences Curriculum at the Centre for Open Learning, June 2021 – May 2022

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