Rin Ushiyama

I am Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Science, Education, and Social Work, Queen's University Belfast.

I joined Queen's in 2021. I am also a Fellow of the Queen's Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. I hold a PhD in Sociology (2017) from the University of Cambridge.

I am a cultural sociologist of violence. My research straddles multiple areas including cultural sociology, political sociology, memory studies, sociology of religion, and social theory.

I’m interested in how individuals, groups, and institutions make sense of violent events including wars, terrorism, and colonialism through processes such as commemorative acts, art, media reports, and social activism. I research how actors engage in meaning-making processes through narratives and how different stakeholders construct multiple and conflicting accounts of the same event.

For the past few years, I have been researching the Japanese far right’s denial of atrocities committed under Japanese colonialism and during World War Two: a movement known as ‘historical revisionism’ which emerged in the 1990s. I also have a developing research project on the Myanmar government’s denial of the Rohingya Genocide.