Frazer Macdonald Hay

Founder, Uniform November

 

Frazer Macdonald Hay is the founder of Uniform November, an interdisciplinary consultancy working at the intersection of architecture, memory, violence, and peacebuilding. His work focuses on how everyday places and people shaped by conflict, displacement, and trauma can be engaged to support social cohesion, recovery, and long-term peace.

With over two decades of experience across conflict and post-conflict contexts, Frazer works with governments, UN agencies, cultural institutions, universities, and civil society organisations to design trauma-informed, conflict-sensitive approaches to recovery that place communities, memory, and the everyday at their centre.

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A Practice Grounded in Service and Risk

Frazer’s early professional life included service in the Royal Air Force and later the Fire and Rescue Service. These roles provided first-hand experience of risk, trauma, institutional culture, hierarchy, and teamwork under pressure. They continue to inform his approach to peacebuilding and recovery work in fragile environments, where trust, clarity, and ethical judgement are essential.

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Architecture, Education, and Institutions

Trained in architect, Frazer contributed to the design and delivery of the Scottish Parliament building with EMBT/RMJM Architects. His academic and institutional leadership includes serving as Founding Director of the Glasgow School of Art Singapore, established in partnership with Singapore’s Ministry of Education, and senior academic roles at Edinburgh Napier University, where he founded the Centre for Reuse and Recycling of Buildings (CRRB).

He has lectured, examined, and led programmes across Scotland, England, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, Malaysia, India, and Southeast Asia, with a sustained focus on adaptive reuse, cultural memory, and interdisciplinary practice.

 

Peacebuilding, Memory, and Post-Conflict Recovery

Frazer has led and advised on peacebuilding, recovery, and cultural heritage projects in Iraq, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, Israel, Ukraine, Syria, and across Africa. His work examines how ordinary buildings and everyday spaces carry difficult memories, and how engaging with them can support dialogue, healing, and coexistence.

 

Key roles include:

• Peace and Conflict Consultant, International Organization for Migration (IOM), Iraq

• Consultant, ICCROM / UNESCO – Revive the Spirit of Mosul

• Peace and Conflict Consultant, The HALO Trust / UNMAS / Al-Ghad

 

Ukraine: Peacebuilding in Real Time (Ongoing)

Uniform November has been working in Kyiv, engaging directly with actors shaping peacebuilding under the immediate pressures of ongoing war. This work focuses on how societies improvise resilience under fire, and how peacebuilding must emerge alongside survival, not after violence ends.

This ongoing engagement informs both consultancy and research, grounding recovery and reconciliation as lived, everyday processes shaped by exhaustion, scarcity, and risk.

 

Advisory, Assessment, and Governance Roles

• Advisory Board Member – Scottish Peace Platform

• Large Grants Assessor – British Council, Cultural Protection Fund

• Member, Scottish Parliament Cross-Party Group on Architecture and the Built Environment

• Member, Scottish Parliament Cross-Party Group on International Development

 

Writing, Research, and Public Engagement

• Contributor, The Scotsman

• Author, Uniform November Blog
  Writing on peacebuilding, memory, displacement, everyday architecture, and post-conflict recovery.

 

Current Research and Projects

Frazer is currently writing Erasures of Everyday Sites of Violence: Architecture, Memory, and the Silencing of Victims in Post-Conflict Iraq, a forthcoming Routledge book chapter.

Ongoing work includes:

• Syria, with the Turathuna Foundation

• Ukraine, with Dignity Space

• United Kingdom, with the British Council’s Cultural Protection Fund

 

Education and Ongoing Research

• MLitt Peace and Conflict Studies — University of St Andrews

• MSc Architectural Conservation — University of Edinburgh

• PGCert Higher Education

• BA (Hons) Architecture — First Class

Doctoral Research in Politics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh
Four years of advanced research on memory, place, and post-conflict peacebuilding

 

Current Focus

Frazer’s current work is driven by peacebuilding, education, investigation, and writing.

He works across national and international contexts to explore how conflict and recovery are lived in everyday places—profiling people, events, and environments that deepen our understanding of peace and violence beyond headlines, institutions, and policy abstractions.

His practice combines creative, research-led methods with field engagement and long-form writing, allowing complex realities to be examined without simplification. Central to this work is an advocacy for place-based peacebuilding, critical education, and a more nuanced approach to international relations—one that acknowledges contradiction, resists binary narratives, and takes the everyday seriously as both a site of harm and a space for repair.

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A full professional CV is available on request.

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