Dr Claire Moon

Claire Moon is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her research and teaching confront broad themes such as death, politics, violence and justice.

Claire is the author of Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is currently working on two new book projects. The first of these is entitled Extraordinary Deathwork. It concerns the particular forms of death labour that emerged in response to violent death in the context of Mexico’s so-called ‘war on drugs’. The second, entitled Human Rights, Human Remains, concentrates on the broader history, politics, practices, and ethics of forensic exhumations of mass graves. It looks at the dead body as the object of humanitarian concern and action. It asks whether, as a result of humanitarian activity around the dead, we can argue that the dead have human rights. These two new books are derived from a major research project funded by the Wellcome Trust entitled Human Rights, Human Remains: Forensic Humanitarianism and the Politics of the Grave (2018-2022). A short film relating to that project entitled ‘Do the dead have human rights?’ can be viewed here.

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.

Key expertise: Death, Politics, Atrocity, Justice, Humanitarianism, Human Rights, Science

Claire’s research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust and the LSE. It has informed the development of new international protocols and national and UN reports on mass grave location, protection and exhumation. Claire has also served on the advisory board of a citizen science collective of families of the disappeared in Mexico and continues to collaborate with family organisations searching for their missing relatives. Her research has also been used to support Mexican asylum cases in the United States.

Claire teaches across a range of programmes at all levels in the Department, including courses driven by her research interests. These include an undergraduate course, SO309 Atrocity and Justice, and a postgraduate course, SO457 Political Reconciliation. She will soon launch a new MSc course entitled The Social and Political Lives of the Dead, tying her longer interests in politics, atrocity and social suffering to her recent research on violent death and deathwork. Claire has supervised PhDs on a range of topics including the military refusenik movement in Israel, state crimes in Mexico, memory and justice in Cambodia, transitional justice in Colombia, state crimes and social movements in Argentina, migrant deaths in Europe, and victim movements in Mexico. Claire is the recipient of several teaching prizes, most recently in 2024.

In 2023, Claire established the first association of academics of first generation/working class background at the LSE.