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Tamsin Mitchell is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow with the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM), School of Journalism, Media and Communication, which she joined in October 2022. She completed her PhD in Politics at the University of York’s Centre for Applied Human Rights in 2021, also funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Since then, Tamsin has worked as an independent researcher and consultant, with clients including the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights. She has 15 years’ prior experience of working in the international human rights and development sector, including managing programmes of research and advocacy in Latin America and Africa for PEN International from 2007-2016, providing support to writers and journalists at risk.

Tamsin’s postdoctoral fellowship focuses on publication and dissemination of the findings of her doctoral research. An adapted version of her PhD dissertation will be published as a monograph by Routledge in 2024. The book will offer a qualitative, comparative, bottom-up exploration of journalists’ responses to impunity for violence against journalists in Mexico and Honduras, both formal democracies with high levels of violence. It will provide a critique of International Relations/ politics debates on the value of appeals to international human rights standards to local civil society. The book will show the centrality of self-protection and the significance of the norms of professional journalism over international human rights norms and legal rights in journalists’ mobilisation and accountability efforts. She also plans to develop articles and presentations for academic and non-academic audiences.