Dr Marcel Obst PhD, MAR, MA, MA, PGCE, BA
Research Fellow, Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research (CENTRIC)
Summary
I joined the Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research (CENTRIC) in 2022 as a Research Fellow and am an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick.
About
My research explores ecosystems of harm, focusing on mapping their occurrence and developing strategies to mitigate them and support affected communities. I concentrate on online environments, public-facing professionals, gender, and far-right movements. One of the key projects I currently work on is the UKRI-funded 3PO (Protecting public-facing professionals and their dependents online), which seeks to map and develop technical and non-technical solutions to address online harms. I specialise in qualitative methods, with a particular interest in feminist methodologies.
I joined CENTRIC in 2022 as a Research Fellow and am an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick. I hold master’s degrees in the fields of Sociology and Gender Studies from the University of Leeds and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). Following this, I completed an ESRC-funded PhD at the University of Warwick, exploring Spanish anti-gender movements through an ethnography centred on religion, nationalism and affect. In 2021, I worked with the Counter Extremism Unit of the Home Office as part of an UKRI-funded position. In 2022, I was an ESRC-funded visiting researcher in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain).
Research
- Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research
Publications
Journal articles
Obst, M. (2024). Methodology for the disliked: a call for situated ethics in close-up research with anti-gender groups. Qualitative Research. http://doi.org/10.1177/14687941241288194
Obst, M. (2024). Not in the mood for gender and feminism. Exploring affect and expertise through Spanish anti-gender movements. Women's Studies International Forum, 104. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2024.102892
Obst, M. (2015). Social Movements and Sexual Citizenship in Southern Europe. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 23 (1), 160-162. http://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2014.1002319
Conference papers
Bayerl, P., Obst, M., Spencer, J., Snowden, M., & Akhgar, B. (2024). Privacy Strategies for Police Personnel: Co-designing a Self-Assessment Tool. In 23rd International Conference on e-Learning, e-Business, Enterprise Information Systems, & e-Government, Las Vegas, USA, 22 July 2024 - 25 July 2024.
Book chapters
Obst, M., & Ablett, L. (2024). 978-3-031-54222-0. In ‘They Put You in a False Dichotomy’: In Search of Conceptual Diversity Through the Spanish ‘Anti-Gender’ Landscape. Palgrave Macmillan
Obst, M. (2017). Queer Migration. In Dicionário Crítico De Migrações Internacionais. Editora UnB
Postgraduate supervision
PhD supervision:
I currently supervise two PhD students working on online harms to public-facing professionals.
Media
Media and non-academic publications:
- Media Intervention: REPHRAIN Festival of Privacy (March 2024, timestamp 2:22).
- German national radio (Deutschlandfunk Kultur) intervention on Spanish anti-gender movements (April 2024, timestamp 27.12, in German).
- International Citizen Consultation on AI Accountability in Policing (2023).
- Contribution to German Heinrich Böll Foundation: How Opposition to Gender and Feminism Emerged in Spain (2020).
- Huffington Post article on disinformation (May 2020, in Spanish).