- Dr Chiara Amini
Find out more about Chiara's research on her UCL Profiles page
- Sarah Ferner
I am interested in how young British Muslims and young British Jews think and speak about Israel, Palestine and the Holocaust.
My research will immerse young British Jewish and Muslim co-producers/enquirers in different kinds of thinking (creative, collaborative, critical and caring) to investigate Israel, Palestine and the Holocaust as entities, distant geographically and in time, but inextricably intertwined with their everyday lives and formative experiences. This research views listening to children’s ideas and opinions on matters that affect them as central to ideas of participation, social justice, democratic practice and agency. My research centralises children’s meaning-making and validates children’s voice and agency.
The design of my research is focused on the creation and curation of a cache of objects, stories and artefacts by British Jewish and Muslim co-producers/researchers/experts, including myself, with some of these arising specifically from my own (auto-ethnographic) back story. This research acknowledges objects, stories and artefacts as carriers of complex visual, material, cultural and social meanings generating multiple narratives and interpretations.
As a working teacher with twenty years experience in the classroom, the opportunity arises for me in addition, to combine a range of research methods with my pedagogic expertise in facilitating Socratic conversations using the pedagogy known as Philosophy for Children (P4C). The use of P4C as an experimental research method requires me to engage with the paradox of being at the self-same time an authority figure (a teacher) and facilitator, embracing both interdisciplinary, inclusive, participatory research methods and P4C which mirrors them; in being an inclusive and democratic pedagogy; bucking those trends in mainstream education which tend to position children as passive acquirers of knowledge, imparted mainly through direct instruction.
Find out more about Sarah's research on her UCL Profiles page.
- Dr Dai George
Dai George recently published How to Think Like a Poet (Bloomsbury, 2024), a book of poetry criticism and biographical writing aimed at the general reader. Through 24 short chapters, it surveys the global poetry canon and asks what we can learn about the way that poets think. The research involved a lot of reading poetry and poets’ biographies (as one would expect!) alongside broader historiography to situate the poets in question. Currently Dai is working on his second novel – a contemporary dark comedy set in South Wales – and beginning to think about a poetry project titled Beyond Mercy. This might engage multidisciplinary perspectives to explore the possibilities (and limits) of mercy in contemporary society.
Find out more about Dai's research on his UCL Profiles page.
- Dr Yi Gong
My research is focused on the interactions between humans, health and the built environment. I applied social and geographical data science to study how these interactions are affected and/or mediated by socioeconomic factors and the development process both in the Global South and North, with strengths developed in two themes: (1) sustainable development and healthy cities. My work examines the spatio-temporal relationships between mobility, inequalities and accessibility and explores the inequalities (e.g. health inequalities, access to service), environmental justice and sustainable development in the cities from the Global South and North. (2) Community resilience and vulnerability to hazards and climate change-related disasters. I have published widely in human geography, environmental science, public health, planning and sustainability. I have a track record of developing and implementing interdisciplinary research projects.
My recent projects include the NERC & ESRC + NSFC project “Resilience to earthquake-induced landslide risk in China”, the Newton-Ungku Omar Institutional Links project “Systems thinking and place-based methods for healthier Malaysian cities”, and the Newton UK-China researcher links projects “Urban analytics at the interface between environment, human health and behaviour” and “The impact of rapid urbanisation on health in Chinese mega-cities”.
FInd out more about Yi's research on her UCL Profiles page.
- Dr Anne Irfan
My research theorises forced migration with a postcolonial framework. By examining the ways in which colonial structures continue to shape the hierarchies of the global refugee regime, it challenges conventional migration theories that emphasise singular events and push-pull factors. Instead, I theorise displacement and refugeehood as key elements of international politics, embedded within the establishment of postcolonial states, and the construction of Global North and South. My current project excavates the co-constitutive relationship between statehood and im/mobility. With a focus on formerly colonised parts of the world, it complicates theories of postcolonial statehood by examining the ways in which state-building projects have relied on both expulsion and immobilising measures to acquire sovereignty after (ostensible) decolonisation. At the same time, it repositions refugees as actors in the state-building process, and not simply passive subjects. In so doing, it seeks to highlight the colonial continuities that accompanied the ruptures of decolonisation.
Find out more about Anne's research on her UCL Profiles page.
- Dr Lara Monticelli
Lara Monticelli is an economic sociologist dedicated to analysing contemporary capitalism, its crises, and the pursuit of more just and sustainable alternatives from an interdisciplinary perspective. She previously worked as an Assistant Professor and Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark. While at CBS, Lara led the EU-funded research project EcoLabSS, which focused on the (re)emergence of community-based, prefigurative social movements—such as sustainable communities, eco-villages, transition towns, and solidarity networks—as living laboratories exploring practices of resilience and resistance in the face of environmental, economic, and societal challenges. For her EcoLabSS project, Lara conducted extensive empirical research and site visits to ecovillages and intentional communities in Italy, Denmark, and India.
- Explainer video for EcoLabSS project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1wtB7kIOVg&t=10s
- Video of invited lecture on prefigurative politics at the Pufendorf Institute of Advanced Studies at Lund University (Sweden): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsYi_03fXXI&t=15s
Currently, Lara is working on two journal articles. The first is based on her experience teaching about capitalism and its "alternatives" within the context of business education. Despite the widespread belief that the goal of business higher education today is to prepare future managers and entrepreneurs to address the world's "great challenges," it remains rare to engage in academic discussions about how capitalism can be defined, historicized, and critically evaluated within business school classrooms. In this context, the article raises a provocative question: What occurs when a course explicitly inspired by an influential sociological framework that critically examines contemporary capitalism and envisions more just and sustainable alternatives is taught at a top-ranked business school? What reactions, emotions, and reflections does this elicit among students, faculty, and the public?
The second article, still at a very preliminary stage, is a collective symposium wherein various authors reflect on and problematize the concept of "alternative organization" through decolonial, feminist, and ecological lenses.
Find out more about Lara's research on her UCL Profiles page.
- Carolina Moore
Find out more about Carolina's research on her UCL Profiles page.
- Dr Temenuga Trifonova
I am currently finishing my seventh book, Precarity in Western European Cinema, in which I explore the genre and stylistic features of ‘the new European cinema of precarity’, the political and social values embodied in it, and the ways in which these films stage class conflict and class struggle. Through my analysis of cinematic representations of the dramatic recalibrations in labor relations under neoliberalism, from the precarization of labor and zero-hour contracts to ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘quiet firing’, I aim to find out whether ‘the new European cinema of precarity’ lends validity to Guy Standing’s designation of the precariat as ‘the new dangerous class’. The heterogeneity of the concept of precarity as a continuum of insecure conditions is reflected in the heterogeneity of the films that make up the new European cinema of precarity. What brings them together is their attentiveness to the affective experience of precarity, which ranges from social alienation through mental and nervous breakdown to imposterism.
The book is slated for publication by Amsterdam University Press in June/July 2025.
In 2023 I was Stiftung Südtiroler Sparkasse Global Fellow at EURAC Research in Bolzano. Some of the work I did there can be accessed here: https://www.eurac.edu/en/blogs/imagining-futures/fake-it-till-you-make-it-inventing-the-neoliberal-self
In summer 2025 I will be Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Graz within the Field of Excellence Dimensions of Europe: https://dimensions-of-europe.uni-graz.at/en/
Find out more about Temenuga's research on her UCL Profiles page