Before working as Lecturer in Criminology at the School for Policy Studies, I taught for several years at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies on topics including migration, gender, race and racism, global sociology and research ethics. My research interests include immigration detention and borders, state violence and harm, migration and masculinities. As an activist-sociologist and interdisciplinary researcher, I collaborate closely with the third sector in my research. 

My recent doctoral research begins with the observation that men are disproportionately detained in Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) in the UK, yet research that considers the gendered dimensions of male detainment is rare. Through a nuanced and multifaceted ethnography of IRCs, I argue in my thesis, Men, masculinities, and the temporal necropolitics of UK immigration detention (2022), that detainment can be profoundly harmful, and that this harm results from systemic and instrumental violence. Furthermore, I contend that detention’s violence operates across two distinct yet interactional temporalities – slow and fast – and through multiple interrelated sites including the state, families, bodies and the IRC itself. These many forms of suffering are conceptualised as facets of postcolonial necropower, which exposes detainees to the threat of death and injury. While some are able to survive and resist in complex and contested ways, I contend, crucially, that detention’s violence is both gendered – mediated and experienced through intersectional gendered divisions and processes – and gendering – acting upon the production and performance of detainees’ masculinities.

Other recent (2022) research includes coproduced work with communities that attempts to build reliable estimates of Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation (FGC/M) prevalence and attitudes in the UK. This work responds to evidence that overzealous safeguarding policies based on inflated prevalence estimates can cause trauma and stigmatisation among children, their families and wider communities with heritage in FGC/M-affected groups. I also worked on a recent (2023) paper that explores politics and voice in just transitions to climate change at the city-level, with a focus on the exclusion of women and people of colour in just transition decision making in Bristol.

I am a member of Migration Mobilities Bristol and The Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship. 

I am a former organising committee member for Refugee Tales, a creative campaigning project in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and immigration detainees, and former UK Programme Coordinator at Rwandan Youth Information Community Organisation, where I faciliated arts and heritage work with UK-based survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

I hold a BA in International Relations and Politics and an MA in Migration Studies from the University of Sussex.