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Hannah Wright

@hannahwright.bsky.social

5.7K followers 1.5K following 304 posts

Researching militarism, coloniality, state violence, abolition, gender, race, class. Lecturer at University of Manchester. She/her. ♿️ research.manchester.ac.uk/en/person…

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Hannah Wright @hannahwright.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Cover for the CD single of Baby Come Back by Pato Banton featuring Ali and Robin Campbell of UB40.

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Hannah Wright @hannahwright.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

The words of Manchester Jewish Action for Palestine (posted on Instagram) seem particularly prescient in light of the Home Secretary’s comments framing pro-Palestinian protests as insensitive to the victims of this terrible attack.

Manchester Jewish Action for Palestine is deeply saddened by the attack on Heaton Park Synagogue today, and our thoughts are with all members of the communities who have been affected. While all the details are not yet clear, we do not wish to speculate on the motive behind the attack. However, we must stand together against those who would seek to use the pain and grief of Jewish communities to score political points.

Israel, which is totally dependent on the support of its Western allies, routinely exploits antisemitism in order to create fear, helping to sustain its occupation and genocide. The actions and words of Netanyahu and the Israeli state, claiming to represent all Jews worldwide are placing diaspora Jews at increasing risk of violence. We must not allow ourselves to be divided by religion or ethnicity - what unites all of us is our common humanity.

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Hannah Wright @hannahwright.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Looking back at some of my own undergraduate essays and they are littered with snarky asides. Apologies to Dr Leopold for making this hard to mark by including the claim that Charles Fourier was “bonkers”. Though honestly I think this would make marking more enjoyable for me.

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Hannah Wright @hannahwright.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

I spent weeks searching Google scholar/UoM library for something that reads poststructuralist feminism through the lens of materialism/Marx/Gramsci/ideology and it was Ebay’s ‘based on your recent views’ section of all things that came up with the goods

Cover of the book ‘Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse’ by Rosemary Hennessy

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Hannah Wright @hannahwright.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

It has also been used in far-right "anti-woke" discourse (including by Tory ministers) to argue that civil servants and their alleged fixation with EDI *threatens* diversity of thought. The language of diversity often enables this co-optation by evading questions of power and structural injustice.

Screencap from the Daily Mail:
Ditch the woke 'witch trials': Attorney General Suella Braverman hits out at diversity training and reveals she scrapped it in her own department
Attorney General Suella Braverman, 42, has warned against diversity zealots
Ms Braverman says she has scrapped equality training in her own department
She says she discovered her staff had spent 2,000 hours in Stonewall lectures
The Attorney General today launches a fightback against woke ‘witch trials’.

Suella Braverman brands the diversity industry a ‘new religion’ in which zealots seek to punish unbelievers while others are too scared to speak out.

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Hannah Wright @hannahwright.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

I'm grateful to Security Dialogue for publishing my new (open access) article exploring how discourses on promoting 'diversity of thought' circulate in the UK national security policy community, and the political work they do in relation to hegemonic security thinking 🧵: doi.org/10.1177/0967...

Diversity of thought as ‘mission critical’: Knowledge, politics and power in UK national security policymaking

Abstract
The idea that diversity and inclusion in policymaking institutions is a national security imperative because it enhances ‘diversity of thought’ has proliferated among policymakers in recent years. Building on critical, feminist and postcolonial scholarship arguing that constructions of gender, race and class undergird hegemonic militaristic and colonial approaches to security, this article analyses how the discourse on diversity of thought occasionally challenges, but more often reinforces these hegemonic approaches. Based on interviews with UK civil servants, the article explores how this discourse, and consequent measures to promote diversity of thought by creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace, have developed in the UK national security community, analysing how officials interpret the relationship between demographic diversity and knowledge production. Using feminist epistemologies as a heuristic, the article argues that although some officials view this agenda as a means to challenge militaristic thinking, the commonplace exclusion of structural power analysis places hard constraints on its ability to achieve this end and has enabled its recuperation by far-right anti-equality agendas. Ultimately, the politics of diversity are insufficient to overcome UK national security institutions’ commitment to militarism, which demands attention to the material structures that make militaristic approaches to security appear necessary.

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