SOAS Research Clusters

Lucia Kula

Dr Lucia Kula is an International Human Rights Lawyer and Lecturer in Law and Gender at SOAS, University of London. Her research adopts an interdisciplinary approach to law, borders, gendered violence, and decolonisation. She is a former refugee from Angola and writes on law and forced displacement issues and identity in the African diaspora, with a focus on critically analysing the experiences of women and other marginalised communities. She convenes the Gender Studies and Law Programme, and she is the Widening Participation Lead for the School of Law within SOAS. She also consults for other Higher Education institutions in the UK on Race Equity and Decolonising The Academy.

Dzodzi Tsikata

Dzodzi Tsikata is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. Before this, she was Professor of Development Sociology and immediate past Director of the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at the University of Ghana. Her research in the last 30 years has been in the areas of gender and development policies and practices; agrarian change and rural livelihoods; the labour relations of the informal economy and transformative social policy. Her recent publications are the co-edited (with Elisabeth Prügl and Fenneke Reysoo) Forum in the Journal of Peasant Studies on the theme “Commercialising Agriculture/Reorganising Gender” (JPS 48,7, September 2021). She is also the Principal Investigator of a pan-African research, networking and advocacy project, the Gender Equitable and Transformative Social Policy for Post-COVID-19 Africa (GETSPA) which is examining the social policy trajectories of thirty-one African countries. She is the secretary of the executive committee of IDEAS and a member of the Agrarian South Network and a member of the editorial collectives of Feminist Africa and Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.

Awino Okech

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Sophie Chamas

Sophie Chamas is lecturer in gender studies at the Centre for Gender Studies within the School of Law, Gender, and Media at SOAS. Their work sits at the intersection of queer and feminist political theory, political economy, Middle East Studies, and cultural studies. Their research is focused on the study of the life, death, and afterlife of the radical political imagination in the Middle East and its diaspora via a queer feminist lens. They are part of the editorial collective for Feminist Review.

Hannah Bargawi

Dr. Hannah Bargawi is a Reader in Economics at SOAS, University of London where she convenes courses in Gender Economics and Development Economics. Dr. Bargawi’s research spans macroeconomic policies and employment as well as gender and labour market issues, including the links between paid and unpaid work. Her research is focused on East and North Africa, the Middle East as well as Europe. She recently contributed a chapter on "How does Economics address Gender?" in a textbook entitled Recharting the History of Economic Thought as well as an article on 'Re-negotiating Social Reproduction, Work and Gender Roles in Occupied Palestine' in the Review of International Political Economy (2021). She has acted as a consultant for organisations including UN Women, the ILO and the Asian Development Bank.

Shirin Rai

Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. Before joining SOAS, she was Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Warwick. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Rai’s research interests lie in performance and politics, gender and politics and feminist international political economy. She has published widely in these areas, including Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Polity, 2004) Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Carole Spary; OUP), 2019; Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (2021; co-eds M Gluhovic, S Jestrovic and M Saward) and is currently working on a book titled Doing Politics Sideways. Her latest book (forthcoming) Depletion: the human costs of caring.