Study with Us

Princess Banda

Inspired by what has been described as ‘a Black maternal health crisis’ Princess Banda is researching Black UK-based women’s experiences of racism in the maternal period – during pregnancy, birth and post-partum. Read her chapter “An introduction to the Framework of ‘Obstetric Racism’: Theory and Intellectual Lineage” in the ‘Routledge Companion to Gender and Reproduction’.

Kimberly Schoemaker

Kimberly Schoemaker's research on the common coastal engineering practice of beach renourishment and its implications for climate-vulnerable coastal communities has been published in the journal Antipode. Her article, ‘Sand-Hungry: Accumulations, Erosions, and the Self-Feeding Logic of Beach Renourishment,’ takes a critical stance, arguing that renourishment in fact exacerbates coastal erosion whilst at the same time incentivising continued property development along a vulnerable shoreline.

Karl Dudman

Karl Dudman's research explores attitudes to climate change amongst communities in coastal North Carolina. Why do people living in an area highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change seem to vote for candidates who oppose strong climate action? Listen to Karl discuss his research on the podcast Your Brain on Climate.

Fiona Asokacitta

Doctoral student Fiona Asokacitta has a deep interest in contentious museum displays and the interrogation of visual materials of colonialism, violence, and contested memory. Read her entry in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict where she describes how the controversial Cold War era anti-communist site, the Sacred Pancasila Monument and Museum, serves as a poignant case study of the role of museums and monuments in shaping the collective history of a traumatic national event.

Vittorio Bruni

Vittorio Bruni is a DPhil candidate in Migration Studies, his doctoral research investigates humanitarian aid reductions and informal credit systems in refugee camps, analysing how these dynamics shape both household strategies and local markets. Read an article summarising his research into the impacts of aid cuts and delays in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, and exploring the policy implications of the findings.

Sophie Berdugo

Sophie's research focuses on social learning in wild chimpanzees, and how variation in social learning experiences produces long-term individual variation in behaviour. Her DPhil thesis established long-term stable and reliable individual differences in stone tool use efficiency in the Bossou chimpanzee community in Guinea, West Africa, and found that these differences appear to arise whilst developing the skill. Watch her discuss her research in a video on our YouTube channel.

JC Niala

JC Niala's (DPhil Social Anthropology) interdisciplinary work includes two distinct yet interconnected areas: the study of human-nature interactions and the transformative potential of community participatory research in museum settings. Her doctoral research examined the complex interactions of urban gardeners in the city of Oxford with their material spaces. Read her storymap 'Digging for Utopia. Exploring how urban gardens imagine, invent and produce a better future within Oxford'.

Gabriella Kountourides

Gabriella Kountourides' (DPhil Biological Anthropology) doctoral research investigated whether premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is the manifestation of environmentally induced inflammation. Read her article in The Conversation which explores findings from her research into menstrual cycles and COVID vaccinations.

Siyu Tang

DPhil student Siyu Tang's research broadly focuses on the ideological, social and political transformations during and after China's marketisation reforms. Read her reflections of the rhetoric of governance in China under COVID-19.

Kevin Wang

Kevin is a DPhil candidate in Migration Studies. His research interests are wide-ranging and include urban anthropology, new urban narratives, interpretations through infrastructure, economic transformations and urban/rural development. Watch his video on the development of cities in China.