Our network

Omolabake Fakunle is a Teaching Fellow and Coordinator of the MSc Education General Pathway at the Moray House School of Education and Sports. She is Course Organiser of the MSc Course, “Higher Education in the Global Context”. She teaches MSc Education courses, including Education Policies and the Politics of Education.

Her research areas include internationalisation, student experience and employability. She is particularly interested in exploring missing voices in dominant discourses in internationalisation processes.

Nini’s research foregrounds the lived experiences and examines how the socio-political bears upon the personal-subjective through psychoanalysis and critical theory. She devises and works with creative, qualitative methodology in composing evocative accounts of the other and their lived domains.

An accredited psychotherapist and trainer in counselling education, her teaching pushes for a more politically sensitive curriculum that addresses social inequality in the consulting room.

Jiazhi Fengjiang is a lecturer in Social Anthropology. Her research focuses on late socialism, charity and philanthropy, humanitarianism, social welfare, work and labour, mobilities, gender in China and East Asia. She teaches an interdisciplinary course EMPIRES and she is interested in decoloniality in education and knowledge production. She is a member of Race and Inclusivity in Global Education Network.

Tana is a Teaching Fellow in Race, Ethnicity and Decolonial Thought in the department of Sociology. Her research and teaching utilise an interdisciplinary approach which draws from Black Feminism, Critical Mixed-Race Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Social Anthropology, Latinx Phenomenology and the History of Art and Visual Culture.

Nicola Frith is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies who focuses on memories of African enslavement within the French Republic and social movements engaged in the struggle for reparations.

She has been the holder of two AHRC grants looking at memory, slavery and reparation, and is one of the co-founders of the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR).

Websites: Cartographie des Mémoires de l’Esclavage | International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR)

Tanatsei is a student at Edinburgh College of Art enrolled in the BA Intermedia Art Hons program. As a geographer, historian and culture theorist at heart, she takes an interdisciplinary research-based approach to her practice. Archival material often form the basis of her work.

Her research interests include uncovering indigenous knowledge systems, post-colonial theory, and black geographies.

Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra is Lecturer and Chancellor’s Fellow in Bioethics and Global Health Ethics at the School of Law. Her interests include various issues related to public health, health inequalities and global health emergencies.

She approaches these issues from the perspective of  global justice, structural and epistemic injustice, and gender justice. She is also currently chair of the board of directors at Shakti Women’s Aid.

Alysa’s research interests include race, gender, sexuality, and religiosity, especially in the Caribbean context.

Her new project will examine the lived experience and material realities of pregnancy and trance for Black religious practitioners in Havana.

Julie Gibbings is a Lecturer in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology and author of Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Her research explores histories of racialization, indigenous political modernities, and cartography in Guatemala in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

She is currently developing a new research project on indigenous, insurgent, and counter-insurgent cartographies in Guatemala during the Cold War. She is also interested in collaborative knowledge production with Maya communities.

Lauren Hall-Lew is a Reader in Linguistics and English Language in the School of PPLS.

She is a sociolinguist, studying the relationship between language and society.

Lauren is the lead researcher of the Lothian Lockdown project.

Emma Hil is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. She gained her PhD from Heriot-Watt University in 2017. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Somali Voices in Scotland: Who Speaks? Who Listens? was awarded the MacFarlane Prize for outstanding contribution to research.

She is currently part of the research team for the cross-European JPI Urban/Horizon 2020 GLIMER (Governance and Local Integration of Migrants and Europe’s Refugees) Project and is an Associate Editor for Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power Journal.

Sarah’s teaching and research focus on health inequalities and the social determinants of health, drawing on intersectional and political economy perspectives to examine the social and structural drivers of unequal access to health-promoting resources.

She has a particular interest in health disparities relating to race/ethnicity/Indigenous status and has worked on these issues in New Zealand, the US and the UK.

Sophia Hoffinger is a PhD student in the Social Anthropology Department. Her doctoral research explores ethnographic articulations of and claims to justice, responsibility, and rights within the contested field of anti-colonial and anti-racist Palestine solidarity activism in Germany. Key questions that inspire her research revolve around the construction of memory politics, White Germanness, as well as the politics of speech, judgment, and space.

She is currently the co-producer of RACE.ED’s podcast ‘Undersong: Race and Conversations Other-wise’.

Hannah is Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies. Her work focuses on 20th century Jewish history, particularly the Holocaust and its aftermath; she also works on Jewish migration and transnationalism. She has written on the representation of Jews in religious texts and in museums and on Scottish Jewish history as transnational history.

Her current research explores the relevance of personal archives of Jewish refugees for Holocaust historiography. She is co-editor of the journal Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History published by Taylor & Francis.

Lindsey Horner is a lecturer in Education and Development at Moray House School of Education and Sport.

She works across a number of related topics including peacebuilding education, post-development theory and initiatives and participatory research. The foundation and motivation behind all of her research is a commitment to social justice and epistemic justice.

Hephzibah’s research explores the cultural history of South Asia, focusing on the politics of translation in literary, language and religious contexts. She has researched the effects of the encounter of different conceptualisations, practices and functions of translation in colonial and contemporary South Asia. She has held an AHRC grant to study autobiographical narratives of conversion in India. Focusing on translation offers her a productive framework within which to examine and challenge reconfigurations of racial, social and religious identities.

She is passionate about developing critical thinking in her students in these areas. Her teaching at the postgraduate level on postcolonial translation reflects this. She currently holds a British Academy grant to run early career research development workshops in India.

Roger Jeffery is a Professor  of Sociology of South Asia, in the School of Social and Political Science. After conducting field and policy research in South Asia for many years he now spends some of his time on researching the history of Edinburgh.

His recent research has been on the city’s role in the British Empire in India, and the effects of the relationships forged between the 1750s and the present day on contemporary Edinburgh and its major institutions.

Chisomo Kalinga (PhD) is a Wellcome-funded medical humanities postdoctoral at the department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Her current project examines literary traditions and health narratives in Malawi and its border countries.

She is collaborating with the Art and Global Health Centre Africa and the University of Malawi to launch the first medical humanities programmes and a network for Malawiana studies.

Ali’s research is invested in anti, post, and decolonial critiques of Eurocentric modernity particularly thinking alongside the Arab-majority and Muslim-majority worlds and their diasporas. His work includes examining questions of nationalisms, mobilities, entangling racialisations (including internalised Islamophobia), and the environmental catastrophe in moving toward alternative civilisational models. His research and teaching seek to be accessible, transdisciplinary, and engaged.

Dr Michelle King-Okoye is a Lecturer in Nursing Studies at the School of Health in Social Science at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests are marginalisation and health for ethnic minority communities. Her current research examines Covid-19 among ethnic minority communities in developed and developing countries focusing on food security, health related quality of life, vaccine hesitancy and algorithmic bias for ethnic minorities.

She is the founder of the Ethnicity and Covid-19 Research Consortium comprised of international researchers. Michelle is also a member of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee and the Ethics committee at the School of Health in Social Science. She was recently invited to chair a joint United Nations and MESAS 2021 conference where she presented on algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence for ethnic minority communities. She was invited keynote speaker presenting on ‘Resilience among Ethnic Minority Communities’ for the 2021 PGR conference.

Kristina is a Senior Lecturer (from August 2020) in Childhood Studies,  Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland and member of the Childhood & Youth Studies Research Group at the University of Edinburgh.

Her research interests are linked to: children’s rights and inequalities in times of the double humanitarian crises of austerity and the refugee crises; children’s human rights in informal learning public play spaces like community and business play-cafés; children and young people’s human rights and participation in research, practice and policy-making and intersecting childhood inequalities and social justice pedagogies.