Prof. Ana C Dinerstein Department of Social & Policy Sciences

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (MA, PhD, FHEA) is a Professor of Political Sociology and Critical Theory at the University of Bath, where she teaches political sociology, social and cognitive justice, Marxism, critical, decolonial and feminist theory. She is a post-disciplinary scholar-activist, member of the facilitation group of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives' core group and the founder and convenor of Women on the Verge, co- the founder and co-convenor the Standing Seminar in Critical Theory (SWDTP 2019) and the Decolonising Knowledge in Teaching, Research and Practice Research Hub/Centre, SPS Bath)

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 worldwide. She has opened a new decolonial, feminist and critical research field: the global politics of hope. Her research articulates Ernst Bloch's materialist philosophy of hope and the contradictory processes of radical transformations led by urban and rural social, labour, indigenous, women, bringing about concrete utopias that contest the heteropatriarchal-colonial-capitalism. She offers new insights into critical theory and Marxism and the implications for the creation of a new left against the far right. Her books The Global Politics of Hope. The San Francisco Lectures (Kairos, PM) and A Decolonising Marxism (Pluto Press) are forthcoming in 2025/2026

Her previous publications include: The Labour Debate (co-editor and author, 2002, available in Spanish and Turkish), The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Social Sciences for An Other Politics: Women Theorising without Parachutes (Palgrave Macmillan, editor, and author, 2016); Open Marxism 4; Against a Closing World (Pluto Press, co-editor and author, 2019, forthcoming in Spanish and Tamil) and World Beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia (Emerald, co-author, 2021).

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.

Prof. 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 is a political economist researching mining, energy, and labour in the context of green transitions, with a regional focus on Africa and Asia-Pacific. He’s a member of the Editorial Working Group for the Review of African Political Economy and Working Group Coordinator for the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy. He’s the author of a book on the disruption and dependency generated by foreign mining corporations in the DR Congo, the co-editor of a volume of interviews with African and Africanist socialists about liberation struggles on the continent, and the co-producer of a podcast series speaking to students and academics about the challenges of decolonizing African studies in the UK. He is also the co-producer of We Will Win Peace, a feature-length film documenting the harm inflicted on local communities and economies by a Western-led campaign to help end the conflict in the Congo.

Dr Maria Jose Ventura Alfaro Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath

Dr Maria Jose Ventura Alfaro is a Research Associate at the Institute for Policy Research (IPR), currently working as part of a team on a project on education in the UK, examining the transition years post-16 with a specific interest on vulnerable young people. Her research interest includes decolonial feminist thought and action, critical pedagogies, creative methodologies, and critical theory. She has previous experience as a sociology lecturer in the Social and Policy Sciences Department at Bath, bringing decolonial theory to undergraduate social science students from year 1. She was awarded her PhD in 2022. Her thesis explores violence against women and women’s movements in Mexico through a feminist, postcapitalist and decolonial lens. Together with Dr Dinerstein and Dr Enria, she took part in the foundation years of DECkNO, now seeking to develop the “Practice” and “Knowledge” dimensions of the hub.

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.

Dr Shona McIntosh Department of Education

Dr Shona McIntosh is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. Her research interests focus on methodologies for epistemic justice which are applied to research into educative practices in compulsory schooling, particularly on global citizenship education and climate education, in England and internationally. Working with decolonial theories primarily from scholars in South America and Africa, Shona has critiqued research methodologies that emerged during European colonization and proposes delinking from them to move towards epistemically-just methodologies. She is collaborating on projects working in emergent third spaces at the intersection of hegemonic and collective knowledge in educational practice. Shona also teaches decolonisation at Master’s and doctoral level, is an active member of Decolonise Education Collective (DEC) and supports DECkNO as co-lead of the Research and Writing strand and as co-editor of the working paper series Multiversum.

Dr Deborah N Brewis School of Management

Dr Deborah N Brewis is Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Bath, School of Management. She engages in research that seeks to understand how power operates in the workplace, specifically in relation to how management ‘organizes difference’ with respect to gender and race equality, the ways in which we are embodied and the needs that this presents at work. Her current work explores these issues within digital transformations to work and working life. She is actively engaged with the Writing Differently community, collaborating with artists to find creative ways to communicate research and involve the public in the research process. She was a founding member of Building the Antiracist Classroom.

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, International Studies and Languages (PoLIS)

Dr Christina Horvath is a Reader in French at the department of Politics, International Studies and Languages (PoLIS). Her research engages with segregated communities living in European and Global South cities. She focuses on alternative, bottom-up representations in literature, film and art that help marginalised communities challenge urban stigmatization, contest authorised heritage narratives and diversify and democratize memoryscapes. She conceptualised the arts based decolonial methodology of Co-Creation and led several externally funded projects engaging with urban marginality (Co-Creation, RISE H2020 2017-2022), the legacies of colonialism and slavery (Botanical Encounters, BA-Leverhulme 2022-23) and the memorialisation of disputed territories in the Global North and South (DisTerrMem 2019-24). Her key publications include Le Roman urbain contemporain en France (2008), Regards croisés sur la banlieue (2015), Co-Creation in Theory and Practice Exploring Creativity in the Global North and South (2020), Breaking the Dead Silence Engaging with the Legacies of Empire and Slave-Ownership in Bath and Bristol’s Memoryscapes (2024) and Pathways to Agonism (2025, forthcoming). She heads the research group on Politics and Memory at PoLIS and supports DECkNO as co-lead of the Policy and Practice strand.

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.

Dr 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 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.

Dr 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.

Prof. 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.

Dr 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.

Dr 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.

Dr 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.

Dr 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 Department of Social and Policy Sciences

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.

Dr Owasim Akram Postdoctoral Researcher, Dept. of Political Science, Örebro University, Sweden

Dr. Owasim Akram is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science at Örebro University, Sweden. Currently is based at the University of Bath and Visiting Research Fellow. His doctoral research, supported by the Marie Skłodowska Curie Action of the EU, focused on the lived experience of ageing in extreme poverty in Bangladesh. Dr. Akram has extensive experience as a development practitioner, working with organizations like the European Union, Oxfam GB, and BRAC. Currently, he leads a study on extreme poverty and marginalization in Bangladesh, supported by the Expert Group for Aid Studies (EBA), Sweden. He also holds a three-year postdoc grant from the Swedish Research Council (VR), examining epistemic injustice in development research and practice and in collaboration with the University of Bath and Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS). Dr. Akram has published widely and is an Editorial College Member of the Journal of Global Ageing. He is also Member of a number of COST Actions. His research and teaching interests are in the following areas: International Development; Development Management; Social Policy; Extreme Poverty; Welfare/Wellbeing; Global Justice; Ageing/Social Gerontology; Postcolonial and Postdevelopment Theory; Research Ethics; Qualitative Methods and so on.

Kristen Hope Burchill Department of Social and Policy Sciences

Kristen is a PhD student with funding from the UKRI/ ESRC. Her work is inspired by her own childhood growing up in a settler colonial community in the Caribbean, then later studying Arabic and spending 15 years working with child protection agencies in international development and humanitarian contexts. Using action-oriented and participatory approaches, Kristen has worked with children and young people from around the world, including those who have lived through displacement, violence and contact with justice systems, many of whom seek to leverage their lived experience to create change and claim their rights. She has coordinated several international child rights advocacy initiatives, including the child participation component of the Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty and #CovidUnder19. Critically reflecting on these experiences, her research explores the encounter between feminist, decolonial theory and dominant paradigms of rights-based child participation in international child protection.

Dr Robert Eaton Centre for Learning and Teaching

Robert is based in the Centre for Learning and Teaching where he manages the Curriculum and Academic Development Team, supporting staff to develop and apply effective learning and teaching practices. He is currently involved in a QAA-funded project Making human learning visible in an age of invisible AI, and is interested in the wider political context of education and policy.

Yaqian Li Department of Social and Policy Sciences

I am a PhD student at the SPS Department. My study uses sociology of art to analyze the practice and policy discourse of embroidery with participatory perspectives. The research project employs instruments of observational fieldwork and interview strategies to investigate the subject of heritagization of traditional craft through embroiderer’s everyday life experience. This project idea is developed from my BS and MA degrees in textile design and engineering, as well as socio-cultural anthropology studies.

Dr Martin Savransky Department of Social and Policy Sciences

Dr Savransky is a transdisciplinary social theorist and critical environmental studies scholar working on planetary change, global environmental justice, and socioenvironmental transformations after progress. He is the author of Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse (Duke University Press, 2021), and The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry (Palgrave 2026), and co-editor of After Progress (Sage, 2022) and Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures (Routledge, 2017). He has also co-curated the “After Progress” digital exhibition.

Prof. Gail Forey Department of Education

Gail is the Associate Dean (Education) for HSS and a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Education. Passionate about education, her research and publications span written, spoken, and digital workplace communication, systemic functional linguistics, discourse analysis, language education, and teaching development. Currently, she leads a major research project on disciplinary literacy, aimed at enhancing access to the curriculum for all learners.

Dr Noaman G. Ali Department of Social and Policy Sciences

Noaman G. Ali is Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath (UK); previously he was Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Pakistan). His research concerns underdevelopment and dependency, with a focus on agrarian political economy, political ecology, social movements, and radical theory in Pakistan and South Asia. Noaman’s academic work has been published in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Rethinking Marxism. He has also written for the Boston Review, Discourse, Jamhoor, Tanqeed, and BASICS Community News Service. He also hosted the Introduction to Political Economy podcast. He tweets at @noamangali.

Prof. Michael J Proulx Department of Psychology

Michael's primary interest in psychology, neuroscience, and technology is cognition. Inclusive design and participatory research are at the centre of his approach and impact. His research has a foundation in examining cognition and attentional control within the visual system as a means to examine how multisensory processing contributes to perception and cognition. Working with people with visual impairments 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. He is also a research scientist in the tech industry, where he aims to apply these values at scale.