Research team

• Dr Therese O’Toole (Principal Investigator)
  Therese O’Toole is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Ethnicity and Citizenship and School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work has focused on political activism among ethnic minority and Muslim young people, models of local participatory governance and inter-faith social justice movements. Therese is Principal Investigator on the Muslim Participation in Contemporary Governance Project, and is responsible for its overall intellectual and managerial leadership. She is also undertaking the local case study for the project on religion, governance, and public policy in the city of Birmingham, where she previously lived for more than ten years.
• Professor Tariq Modood (Co-Investigator)
  Tariq Modood is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy, the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship and founding editor of the international journal, Ethnicities. He has led many research projects on ethnic minorities and Muslims in the UK and Europe and has published extensively on these topics, especially on the theory and politics of multiculturalism. His latest books include Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (2007), Still Not Easy Being British (2010); and as co-editor  Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship (2009),  Global Migration, Ethnicity and Britishness (2011) and European Multiculturalisms (2012). He is a regular contributor to the media and to policy discussions and was awarded an MBE for services to social science and ethnic relations in 2001 and elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2004. He contributes to the intellectual leadership of the Muslim Participation in Contemporary Governance project.
• Dr Daniel Nilsson DeHanas (National Research, Tower Hamlets Research)

  Dan Nilsson DeHanas is a Research Associate in the Muslim Participation in Contemporary Governance project at the Centre for Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol. He is responsible for the national-level research and the local case study of Tower Hamlets, London.  Dan’s research interests include contentious politics and the sociology of religion. His doctoral thesis focused on the role of religion in youth political participation in Brixton and Tower Hamlets. He has publications from the thesis forthcoming, and has previously written on the contemporary emergence of Islamic environmentalism (in The Sociological Review) and on the London ‘Olympics Mega-Mosque’ controversy (co-authored, in Sociology).

• Dr Stephen H. Jones (Leicester Research)

  Stephen Jones is a Research Assistant at the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol, and works full-time on the Muslim Participation in Contemporary Governance project.  In addition to contributing to the project’s research outputs, Stephen is responsible for the research in Leicester. Before joining the team at Bristol he worked on the Hefce-funded project Religious Literacy Leadership in Higher Education. He completed his doctoral thesis, which examined debates among Muslim activists and scholars about the relationship between Islam and liberalism in Britain, at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2010.

• Dr Nasar Meer (Project Consultant, Northumbria University)

  Nasar Meer is a sociologist at the Northumbria University working on the relationships between minority identities and citizenship programmes. His publications include Citizenship, Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism (Palgrave-2010); European Multiculturalism(s): cultural, ethnic and religious challenges (co-edited with A. Triandafyllidou and T. Modood) (EUP-2011), and Race and Ethnicity (Sage-Forthcoming). He is also working on a monograph under contract with Palgrave-Macmillan entitled Despots After Political Death: Case Studies and Developing Legal Frameworks. He is a Co-editor of Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series (with V. Uberoi & T. Modood), and editorial board member of the journals Sociology, International Journal of Science and Technology, and Sociological Research Online. During 2012-13 he will be based at Harvard and Edinburgh Universities, respectively. www.nasarmeer.com