Hilary Footitt

Profile

Hilary Footitt (formerly Research Fellow at the University of Reading) works on moments of movement and encounter particularly in the context of war, conflict and post conflict situations. She was Principal Investigator for the AHRC project, 'Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict', conducted with the Imperial War Museum, London. Subsequently, she led the AHRC project, 'The Listening Zones of NGOs: Languages and Cultural Knowledge in Development Programmes', with OxfamGB, Christian Aid, Save the Children UK, Tearfund and Southern NGOs in Kyrgyzstan, Malawi and Peru. She has written widely on languages in conflict/post conflict settings, and is co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series 'Languages at War'. Her current project, 'When the Armies Left: Afghan Interpreters and the Politics of Protection', examines the abundant seven year-long international material (from 2014 to 2021) on the fate of Afghan interpreters working with NATO forces, studying how the key actors (military, government departments, media, national lobby groups, professional interpreter associations, the diasporic Afghan community) perceived interpreting, and how these perceptions differed between countries with different levels of commitment to the NATO mission. The project seeks to explore the ways in which discussions on interpreter protection related to national constructions of foreignness, citizenship, immigration and asylum.