Centre Members

Dr Ana C Dinerstein Department of Social & Policy Sciences

Ana Cecilia (PhD Sociology Warwick University) is a critical theorist, political sociologist, scholar activist and co-coordinator of DECKnO along with María José Ventura Alfaro. Her research interest are work, social movements, sociological theory, Bloch’s philosophy, open Marxism, feminism, decolonial horizons and contemporary forms of utopia. She is a member of the BSA ‘Theory’ and 'Postcolonial & Decolonial Transformations' Study Groups, co-founder of the SWDTP Standing Seminar in Critical Theory and a core member of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. She has created a new research field: ‘the Global Politics of Hope’, the focus of which is the contradictory processes of transformation led by social, labour, indigenous, urban and rural movements mainly, but not exclusively, in the Global South. Her notion of the art of organising hope, that is the collective resistance and organising processes that give form to alternative realities, horizons and practices, has inspired artists, NGOs and radical pedagogues’ projects in Europe and Latin America.

Dr Rosana Pinheiro Machado Department of Social & Policy Sciences

Rosana is an anthropologist and social scientist focusing on economic and political transformations in emerging economies. She has been conducting fieldwork and developing international research collaborations across the global south, especially Brazil and China. Her research deals with the topics of globalization, development, and poverty. A thread running through Pinheiro’s research agenda is the desire to gain a longitudinal, local understanding of the major processes of world-making and world-ordering that have transformed emerging countries in economic and political terms.

Dr Rana Jawad Department of Social & Policy Sciences

Rana’s main research interests are in studying the social policies and the welfare systems of the Middle East and North Africa region, with particular emphasis on the Arab and Muslim populations there. She also has a passionate interest for understanding the intersections between religion and public action which has filtered into her research on social policy both in the UK, MENA region and the world at large. These two main lines of enquiry help her make links between social policy, international development and moral philosophy and feed into a much broader theoretical focus on the meanings of wellbeing, the drivers of social welfare action and the mutually constitutive relationship between religious identities and social change.

Dr Peter Manning Department of Social & Policy Sciences

Peter's research explores the connections between human rights, transitional justice, and memory. He is increasingly concerned with the intersections of environmental issues with these fields. Peter is currently writing work that explores the opportunities and challenges in the delivery of genocide education, particularly through arts methodologies; a new book that explores the life trajectories and meaning making practices among ex-combatants after Cambodia's civil war; and the prospects of developing varying 'green' agendas for transitional justice research.

Dr Jason Hart Department of Social & Policy Sciences

Social anthropologist by training, Jason joined the University of Bath in September 2009 after seven years as a researcher and lecturer at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. He is also Visiting Lecturer at the Centre for Children’s Rights Studies, University of Geneva. Much of Jason’s work has explored the experience of and institutional response to young people on the margins of society and the global economy. Themes such as protection, child rights, peacebuilding, home, militarisation and asylum have been central to this research. Much of his research has been undertaken in situations of political violence and displacement. Jason has worked in South Asia (Sri Lanka, Nepal, India and Bhutan) and, increasingly, in the UK. However, his principal area of interest is the Middle East, particularly Israel / occupied Palestinian territories and Jordan.

Dr Ben Radley Department of Social & Policy Sciences

Ben’s research centres on how the global transition to low-carbon economies interacts with and influences emancipatory projects and prospects in Africa, with particular attention to the extractive industries and renewable energy, and a regional focus on Central Africa. He lives in Bristol, where he is active with Stand Up to Racism Bristol and volunteers at Bristol Refugee Rights. Ben has just received funding from the UK Development Studies Association, alongside Dr Cynthia Kamwengo, to hold student engagement workshops to understand gaps in student knowledge about colonialism and African development studies. The knowledge from this exercise will be used to deliver a South West regional workshop in Bristol to discuss lessons learnt with teaching and research colleagues from across the region.

Maria Jose Ventura Alfaro Department of Social &Policy Sciences, PhD

María is an ESRC-funded PhD student in the field of Development Studies, based in the Department of Social & Policy Sciences at the University of Bath. Her research offers a feminist analysis of the contemporary violence against women or Feminicide and social movements’ action in contemporary Mexico. The PhD project attempts to understand the interaction between changes in public policy and the demand of social movements, particularly focusing on the potential benefits of a ‘co-construction of policy’ between social communities and political organisations.

Josie Hooker Department of Social & Policy Sciences, PhD

Josie’s research explores Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) "multiplication of labour" thesis via militant ethnographic enquiry alongside Barcelona’s present-day experiments in “sindicalismo social” (social unionism). Her research investigates the precise relationships between three major and inter-connected expressions of the post-2008 social movement cycle in Barcelona. She is committed to collective knowledge production using militant, participatory action, decolonial and feminist research methods and epistemologies.

Prof. Michael Donnelly Department of Education

Michael’s interests lie in the geography and sociology of education, especially the intersections between education and social, cultural and economic stratification. He is currently leading research critically examining the role and purpose of higher education for Indigenous peoples, addressing fundamental concerns about how the type of university attended impacts on student experiences, skills and knowledge acquired and identifications across different social domains.

Dr Shona McIntosh Department of Education

Shona’s primary research interests lie in understanding the inter-relations between learning and development through the lens of historical, social-cultural activity theory. Her fields of research include professional learning, international education, and the long-term impact of educational experiences. Her doctoral thesis took a sociocultural approach in examining the professional development of trainee teachers during their teaching practice placements.

Dr Deborah Brewis School of Management

Deborah works principally in the three areas of critical diversity studies, creative methodologies for management research and learning, and digital labour. She is interested in the ways that organisational discourses and practices create forms of knowledge and emotional response that function to ‘organise difference’ in particular ways. She asks questions in a variety of empirical settings, including organisational ‘diversity’ practices and digital work, and develops novel creative methodologies to learn about them.

Dr Aurelien Mondon Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies

Aurelien currently works on various projects related to liberal and illiberal articulations of racism and right-wing populism, and their impact on liberal democracies. His research interests include Liberal and Illiberal Racisms and Islamophobias in elite discourse, right-wing populism and the people as a ‘threat’ to democracy, the far right and its influence on mainstream politics (historical and contemporary) and the relationship between voting, abstention and democracy.

Dr Christina Horvath Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies

The central topic of Christina’s research is the figure of the city, both as a space of encounter between cultures and a locus of political power and literary legitimacy. She has published widely on urban literature before turning towards the representation of disadvantaged communities in media-political discourses as well as film and literature. She is interested in contemporary urban culture, migration, diaspora, disadvantaged urban communities including French banlieues and Brazilian favelas, globalisation and cosmopolitanism.

Katy Brown Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies, PhD

Katy is a PhD student in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on the mainstreaming and normalisation of far-right discourse, exploring the role of mainstream elite actors in this process. She uses the British referendum on EU membership as a case study, analysing the articulation of racism, colonial nostalgia and hegemonic masculinity in the official Leave and Remain campaigns.

Dr Leda Blackwood Department of Psychology

Leda is a social psychologist in the Department of Psychology. She has conducted research across a range of social phenomenon, including collective action and processes of alienation and radicalisation; social influence, leadership and group advocacy; and the experience and consequences of misrecognition and humiliation. This research has been conducted with various groups including union members, political activists, Muslims, young people and police.

Catherine Butler Department of Psychology

Catherine's research interests include inclusion, whiteness, gender and sexual minorities, intersectionality, assessing student competence, systemic therapy and qualitative research methods. For over ten years, she has produced qualitative research, in both universities and in the NHS. In 2003 winning the BPS Lesbian and Gay Section Postgraduate Prize.

Dr Michael Proulx Department of Psychology

Michael's primary interest in psychology, neuroscience, and computer science is cognition. His research has advanced from first examining cognition and attentional control within the visual system to now examine how multisensory processing contributes to perception and cognition. Working with blind individuals in particular helps to reveal the role of visual experience for cognition and how the "visual" parts of the brain process other information in the absence of visual input.

Dr Luisa Enria London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Luisa’s current work applies approaches from political anthropology to studying community experiences of epidemic preparedness and response and humanitarian emergency interventions. She is also interested in the integration of social science perspectives in biomedical interventions and scientific research, and in particular the tensions and possibilities of interdisciplinary collaborations.

Vandana Sigh Bath Spa University

Vandana is studying for a PhD at the University of Bath focusing on - Gendered Capabilities and Implicit Curriculum: Case Studies of two Primary Schools in Northern India. She hold a MA degree in Educational and International Development from UCL Institute of Education, London. She is also part of the Department of Education's Athena Swan Project at the University of Bath and BAME groups (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) at Bath Spa University.

Ben Parry Bath Spa University

Ben works as an artist, curator and independent researcher at the intersections of art, activism and urban space. Investigating the role of public space as a site for social change, and art as a tool for creating spaces in which to imagine alternative futures, his practice-based research takes diverse forms: from site-responsive interventions, documentary and exhibition to collaborative and community-led projects.

Foluke Adebisi University of Bristol

Foluke is a teacher of law, committed to exploring diversity in the content, process and structure of education, especially legal education. She explores the links between power structures, knowledge production, knowledge transmission and inequalities in (global) society. She believes that nowhere is the association between law and society more overt than in legal education. Understanding the postcolonial nature of law helps trace better connections between race and postcolonial coloniality and the enduring legacy of postcolonial law.

Angeline Barrett University of Bristol

Angeline Barrett’s research addresses the problem of improving teaching and learning in public primary and secondary education in under resourced contexts. She addresses this through collaborating with education professionals to develop pedagogic innovations for engaging students in active learning. Her scholarship critically debates international policy agendas that overdetermine education priorities in low income contexts.

Aslak-Antti Oksanen University of Bristol

Aslak-Antti’s reserach interests include the position of indigenous peoples in global politics, indigenous peoples' nationalism, decolonial and Marxist approaches to International Relations.

Stephen Minton University of Plymouth

Stephen is currently interested in researching processes of inclusion, exclusion, aggression, violence and marginalisation in education and society, especially regarding the experiences of Indigenous peoples, members of alternative sub-cultures, and LGBTQ+ people and addressing abuse, aggression, bullying, prejudice and violence in institutional, educational, community and on-line settings.

Mariano Féliz

Mariano is a a political economist (PhD in Economics, the Université de Paris XIII/Nord, and PhD in Social Sciences, Universidad de Buenos Aires). He is a Fellow Researcher of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONICET) and professor of economics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. His main research interests include Marxism, Dependency Theory, and Political Economy of Development in Latin America. He is a member of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) of the Rosa Luxemburg Fundation (Berlin) and of the Society of Critical Economics of Argentina and Uruguay (SEC). In his home country, he is a social and political grassroots activist. He belongs to the research collective Al Borde that promotes the coproduction of undisciplined, grounded knowledge from/with social movements.

Calum Wheeler

Calum Wheeler is an ESRC PhD candidate in the department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath (Conflict and Security Pathway). His research considers the intersection of ecological Marxism, political ecology, and grassroots organisation in post-conflict contexts. With a particular focus on post-conflict rural Colombia, his work critiques normative and Eurocentric understandings of peace and conflict, and challenges liberal peacebuilding’s tendency towards socio-ecological and epistemic violence. He is committed to participatory methods and decolonised theory, with a concurrent interest in political ecological theory and praxis from the perspective of Latin American Marxist thought.