Dr Claire Moon

Claire Moon is Associate Professor of Sociology at LSE, a member of LSE Human Rights, and was an Associate of LSE's former Latin America and Caribbean Centre. She has degrees in Literature, International Relations, and Politics. Her research and teaching confront broad themes such as politics, death, violence, justice, humanitarianism, and human rights, and have contributed to our understanding of the connections between these domains of social and political life.

Claire's scholarship examines questions of state power, violence, and contemporary political challenges through both theoretical and empirical lenses, with particular focus on the politics of the dead body, social and political responses to mass violence, and the social dimensions of death and disappearance in conditions of political crisis. She is the author of Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and has published widely on topics such as transitional justice, war trauma, reparations, human rights reporting, humanitarianism, victim-blaming, mass graves, and the rights of the dead, engaging contexts such as South Africa, Mexico, and Argentina.

She is currently working on two major new book projects: one on state violence, violent death, and deathwork in the context of Mexico's 'war on drugs', and another on the international history, practice, and ethics of forensic exhumations of mass graves.

Claire is the recipient of eight LSE teaching prizes. In 2023 she established the first association of academics from first generation/working class backgrounds at LSE.

Key expertise: death, politics, violence, justice, humanitarianism, human rights, sociology of knowledge.

Claire’s research is situated at the intersection of political sociology, death studies, human rights and social theory. It examines questions of state power, violence, and social and political responses to it, and is best described as theory-driven empirical research. Her earlier work focused on state crimes and transitional justice on which she has published widely, including her book Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Her current research on politics, violence, death, and deathwork stems from a major project funded by the Wellcome Trust, Human Rights, Human Remains: Forensic Humanitarianism and the Politics of the Grave (2018-2022). A short film from that project, "Do the dead have human rights?", can be viewed here.

This research has generated two new book projects. Extraordinary Deathwork examines 'extraordinary' forms of death labour that have emerged in response to violent death and disappearance during Mexico's 'war on drugs'. Human Rights, Human Remains explores the international history, politics, practices, and ethics of forensic exhumations of mass graves, treats the dead body as an object of humanitarian concern and asks controversial questions such as whether the dead can be said to have human rights.

To support this research, Claire undertook professional training in forensic anthropology (grave exhumation and human skeletal identification) and death management, focusing on human rights investigations, mass disasters, and the humanitarian management of the dead.

Claire’s research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust and the LSE. She sat on the Advisory Board of LSE’s Centre for the Study of Human Rights and was an affiliate of LSE’s Latin America and Caribbean Centre. She is currently on the Advisory Board of Birkbeck’s Centre for Researching and Embedding Human Rights (CREHR). Claire has held visiting posts at the University of Antwerp, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Aguascalientes, Mexico, Centro de Investigaciónes y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Mexico City, Mexico.

Claire has been a member of the editorial board of the British Journal of Sociology and is a member of two of the Department of Sociology's research clusters: Politics and Human Rights and Knowledge, Culture and Technology.

Claire teaches across BSc, MSc, and PhD programmes in the department, including specialist options driven by her research, such as SO309 Atrocity and Justice and SO457 Political Reconciliation. She is launching a new MSc course, The Social and Political Lives of the Dead, which connects her longstanding interests in politics, violence, and social suffering with her recent research on death and deathwork.

Claire has supervised doctoral research on diverse topics including the military refusenik movement in Israel, state crimes in Mexico, transitional justice in Colombia, memory and justice in Cambodia, state crimes and social movements in Argentina, migrant deaths on Europe's borders, and victim movements in Mexico. She is currently supervising doctoral work on glacier death and mass extinction.

Claire has been awarded eight LSE teaching prizes, most recently in 2024.

Claire’s research has informed the development of new international protocols, national reports, and United Nations recommendations on mass grave location, protection and exhumation. She served on the international advisory board of a citizen science collective of families of the disappeared in Mexico, where she continues to collaborate with family organisations searching for their missing relatives. Claire’s research has also been used to provide evidence for Mexican asylum cases in the United States.