Dr Jim Donaghey is establishing a strong reputation in the academic community, and beyond, for high quality innovative research, with a diverse teaching portfolio characterised by commitment to student-led pedagogies.

Jim’s research intensity is evidenced by his publication record, success in attracting significant research funding, and demonstrable research impacts.

He has a wealth of experience in carrying out research into the intersections of culture and politics in diverse global contexts (including Indonesia, Kosovo, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, and the UK), with an emphasis on participatory action and co-creative methodologies. Jim is recognised as an expert in punk and radical politics and has used this as a springboard to explore issues of post-conflict legacies, contested spaces, transnational movement organising, cultural production and industry, and cultural repression. Jim’s work is regularly cited, and has been translated and published in Indonesian, French, Dutch, German and Polish, with a Brazilian Portuguese translation forthcoming.

Jim has taught across numerous humanities disciplines including Politics, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Human/Political Geography, Philosophy, and History.

His scholarly networks are extensive and international in scope. Jim is member of the executive editorial board of Anarchist Studies journal, web editor of AnarchistStudies.Blog, member of the editorial board of Punk & Post-Punk journal, and co-ordinator for the Innovative and Creative methodologies workshops programme at Ulster University.

Forthcoming project:

• 'Laughing in the doorway of the apocalypse': biopolitical evasion/resistance in punk festivity (K-Town Bike Wars case study) – Research Fellow (Käte Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany). April-August 2025.

K-Town Bike Wars entails the mutant augmentation of bicycles for use in a Mad Max-esque festival of jousting and destruction derbies, while occupying a public square in the middle of Copenhagen, Denmark. This project takes the Bike Wars as a case study of biopolitical evasion/resistance, rooted in punk and anarchism. Key themes include: embodiments of punk apocalypse and ‘no futurism’; festivity as escapism, evasion and/or resistance; nihilism as a liberatory response to catastrophe; performative barbarism and occupation of public space as incursion/interruption. Innovative co-creative ethnography will underpin the research relationship.

Current project:

• Failed States and Creative Resistances: The Everyday Life of Punks in Belfast, Banda Aceh and Kosovo (AHRC Early Career Fellowship). Principal Investigator – 2021-current.

With Co-I Dr Robert Porter, this project explores the everyday lives and creative activities of ‘punk hinterland’ communities in the ‘failed state’ contexts of Belfast (north of Ireland), Banda Aceh (Indonesia), and Kosovo (southern Balkans). These research contexts share recent histories of intra-state violence and ongoing conflict, but are primarily analysed in terms of their shared marginality as cultural producers within contemporary neo-colonial global flows. Ethnographic research augmented by innovative and creative methodologies is key to developing insightful critique.

Previous projects:

• ‘Get Portrush a Skatepark!’ Nurturing skateboard culture on NI’s North Coast – innovating a grassroots campaign and policy-oriented lesson-learning (AHRC Creative Communities). Community Innovation Practitioner – 2023-2024.

In collaboration with third-sector partner CAUS (the Causeway Association of Urban Sports) and the wider Portrush skateboarding community, this project intervened to develop understanding of the value of skaters as a Creative Community. This mode of community engagement was used to explore the role of emergent cultural voices in a deeply divided context that is experiencing the detrimental social impacts of profit-oriented gentrification. The project produced a range of podcast and video outputs, research report and grassroots policy recommendation, and methodological innovation.

• Aiôn (Socio-anthropology of the imaginary of time. The case of alternative leisure activities). 2019-2024.

This project was funded by the French National Agency for Research (ANR), proposing a definition of alternative leisure activities and questioning and delimiting the notion of ‘the imaginary’ in its application to the analysis of reality (PI: Dr Audrey Tuaillon Demésy). My contribution to the project focused on punk communities in eastern France, deploying the ‘dialectogram’ as a creative research method at the Chez Narcisse music venue in Val d’Ajol, Vosges region. I took up a post as a visiting researcher at l’université de Franche-Comté in Besançon in summer 2021 and again in early 2022 to engage in this ethnographic work with punk communities in the region and participate in workshops and colloquia.

• The Socio-Politics of Space and Place: developing creative methodologies on-the-ground (Portrush skaters pilot study) and Skate Stopped? Get on Board Portrush! Principal Investigator – 2022-2023.

With Co-I Prof. Richard Ekins and community collaborator/independent videographer Slaine Browne these projects were funded by the AHRC’s Impact Acceleration Account, developing a co-creative video methodology to document the skateboarding community’s experience of semi-rural gentrification/resortification in Portrush in the north of Ireland. We premiered a series of short video outputs at the ‘Stoke Sessions International Conference on the Culture, History & Politics of Surfing & Skateboarding’ at San Diego State University in April 2023 and garnered significant media coverage (BBC, Belfast Telegraph, numerous others) thanks to a public endorsement from world famous skateboarder, Tony Hawk. This impact activity has fed directly into a successful application to the AHRC Creative Communities – Community Innovation Practitioner pilot funding scheme.

• The circulation of anarchism in Indonesia – Multimedia tour of an invisible political space. 2021-2023.

With colleagues at the AlterSEA Observatory of Political Alternatives in Southeast Asia, this project narrates anarchism in Indonesia as ‘an invisible political space’. Funded by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) and hosted at the Centre Asie du Sud-Est (Paris) the project’s outcome was a web documentary consisting of textual and photographic documentary resources, historical archives and interviews. Research outputs were additionally funded by The Lipman-Miliband Trust in the UK, and others were published in Indonesian, English and German.

• The Warzone Dialectogram Project. 2018-2019.

This creative ethnographic project, with the Warzone Collective anarchist/punk cultural producers as research partners, focused on a ‘dialectogram’ of their social space, which was evicted in September 2018 and subsequently demolished as a result of gentrification in Belfast. The ‘dialectogram’ is a methodology developed by Dr Mitch Miller of University of Glasgow’s School of Art, which collaboratively creates an annotated A0-size social map rendering of a physical space, augmented by ethnographic interaction with the community. The project produced three exhibitions and a widely distributed zine. Part-funded by the Political Studies Association.