REACH Research Hub

About REACH

The Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Heritage (REACH) research hub at Wolfson is a transformative space that hosts collaborative action between Wolfson Fellows, students, and staff. The aim is to ignite and support culturally diverse research that impacts on global communities. Our team draws upon and combines academic expertise across the College and wider University. We have five expert academics alongside seven steering group members, as well as our core organising team.

Upcoming Events

Thursday 7 May	Dr Sharon Walker & Dr Sundeep Lidher	Bridges and Battlefields in Education: Reflections on embedding 'diverse', critical, and anti-racist approaches in schools
Wednesday 20 May	President Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu	The REACH Hub Annual Lecture: 'We must move the needle on inequality in academia'

 

Organising team

Dr Kenny Monrose FRSA - Lead Convener Kenny Monrose is an urban ethnographer and affiliated researcher within the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and Tutor and Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College.  Kenny is also a member of Film & Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the Centre for the Studies in Global Human Movement.

Dr Raquel Scarpa-Gebara - Co-convenor  Raquel’s research sits at the intersection of education reform, identity, and social justice, grounded in feminist and decolonial epistemologies (including epistemologies of the Global South). Building on her doctoral work with fisherwomen on the Brazilian Amazonian coast, she examines how educational programmes and policy interventions generate change at both organisational and individual levels, with particular attention to belonging, occupational identity, gendered experience, and the ways race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage shape meaning-making over time. Methodologically, she draws on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and network approaches, including social and epistemic network analysis, as well as qualitative and narrative methods. Raquel is a Bye-Fellow of Wolfson College. Alongside her academic work, Raquel serves as an Education Policy Coordinator, authoring policy briefs and recommendations that support decision-making across the European education landscape. She is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut, teaching History of Educational Thought and Cross-cultural and International Perspectives in Schooling, and contributes to Brazil–Spain comparative studies on pre-service science teachers’ professional identity and perceptions of science education.

Dr Jennifer Davis - Co-convenor  Dr Jennifer Davis an historian and a lawyer.  She is a member of the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College and has a PhD in history from Boston College.  As a historian she has written extensively on law breaking, policing, Irish immigration and poverty in 19th century England as well as comparatively with 20th and 21st century racism and policing and she maintains an interest in this area.  She has also practised as a lawyer specialising in intellectual property law and has been a Faculty of Law lecturer on the subject.  She has written on the history of intellectual property in its social and political context as well as on contemporary intellectual property law.  Recent work has looked at the intersection of sweat shops, trademarks and immigration in late 19th century Britain.  She has an interest in intellectual property law and linguistics and, with Professor Alan Durant, is writing a monograph for CUP on Key Words in Intellectual Property.  She has edited two volumes for CUP on interdisciplinary approaches to copyright and trademarks, respectively.  With Professor Tanya Aplin, Jennifer published in 2022 the fourth volume of their textbook, Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials, for OUP.

Tania Davies - Principal Researcher / Research Development Lead Tania Davies is the Deputy Senior Tutor for Welfare and Wellbeing at Wolfson College. A social research scientist specialising in wellbeing within policy contexts and psychopathological disorders, Tania is a senior fellow of the HEA and has worked in education for two decades. Tania worked as an addictions counsellor for young offenders within the criminal justice system. She went on to become the Health Portfolio Director and then Manager at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David for almost ten years. She held positions within the Military Education for Wales, the Research Centre of Expertise Cymru and the Higher Education for Future Generations Group.

Academic experts

Dr Dita N Love Dita is an alumna of Wolfson College and interdisciplinary social scientist and education researcher interested in intersections across youth education, creative arts and digital humanities, and abolitionist social justice, specialising in creative interventions with young people from underrepresented, marginalised, and minoritised backgrounds. She is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College, where her research focuses on widening participation in higher education through youth-led creative community-university partnerships. As Methods Fellow for the Cambridge Digital Humanities, she is teaching trauma-sensitive creative-critical methods. She also teaches Poetic Inquiry for masters’ students at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge where she worked as an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow and completed a doctorate on Spoken Word with imprisoned young men in the Balkans (Gates Cambridge Scholarship). After her doctorate, she also worked for the participatory Drug Policy Voices project at the Department of Sociology, MMU. Following the publication of award-winning poetry collection “Bewitching”, she was selected as emerging European poet for the Creative EU platform Versopolis. Her research interests are partly informed by her creative practice, and experiences as ethnically Aromanian (Vlach) first-generation student. Her work has been published by the Oxford Review of Education, Australian Art Education, Mantis (Stanford University's journal of Poetry, Criticism & Translation), Palgrave, and Routledge.

Dr Akeem Sule Akeem is the Co-founder of HIP HOP PSYCH and a consultant psychiatrist in General Adult Psychiatry for the Essex Partnership University NHS Trust. He is also an Honorary Visiting Research Associate at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge and is a Research Associate at Wolfson College, Cambridge University. Dr Sule has taught Psychiatry trainees/resident doctors in United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore, Egypt, Nigeria, Ireland and India. He is a member of the Association of University Teachers in Psychiatry. His medical degree was at the Ogun State University Teaching hospital, Nigeria. His Specialist Psychiatry training was with the Oxford Rotational Scheme. He also worked at the department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford and Hammersmith PET centre as a Clinical research worker where he did Neuroimaging Research. Dr Sule is an International member of the American Psychiatric Association. In 2009, he was the winner of the Consultant Teacher of the Year award for Bedfordshire and Luton Partnership Trust and joint winner of the Consultant Teacher for Exams award. Dr Sule is consistently rated as one of the best teachers on the Stage 2 Cambridge medical school Psychiatry course and is a pioneer of the “Old School Hip Hop Method of Teaching”. He is keen in using film for medical education and public mental health education. He is the facilitator of the Association of Black Psychiatrists Culture club.

Dr Tugba Basaran Tugba is the Director of the Centre on the Study of Global Human Movement and a Fellow of Wolfson College. She holds a PhD in International Studies from the University of Cambridge, held visiting positions at Harvard Law, Princeton, Sciences-Po as well as the Institute for Advanced Studies, and tenure at the University of Kent. Her scholarship engages with global practices of governance focusing on the circulation of legal power, violence and the production of difference. Her works draw on political and social thought in relation to empirically rich socio-legal studies incorporating refugee law, human rights law, law of the sea, and more broadly, international law. In her research, she seeks to extrapolate past and present formations of governance, prompting queries on law’s subjectivities, space and time, in an effort to reimagine politics, the way we govern and are governed, and to question established political, legal and social theories.

Professor Roberta Sá Leitão Barboza Roberta Sá Leitão Barboza is a Biologist and post-doctor in Sociology (Federal University of Pernambuco- UFPE, Brazil) and is currently a full professor at the Federal University of Pará.  Roberta has been working in the Amazon with artisanal fishermen and women since 2004 and has been teaching as a university professor for over ten years (UFPA). Since 2014, she has coordinated the interdisciplinary research group Coastal Socio-Environmental Studies and the Laboratory of Teaching, Research and Fisheries Extension with Amazonian Communities. Currently, she develops scientific studies (Popular education, Socio-anthropology of fishing, Fishermen's and women’s Social Organization; Local Ecological Knowledge and Participative Management of Natural Resources) and scientific dissemination products (memory games, puzzles, documentaries, podcasts, booklet) for traditional communities in the Amazon to be used in schools and non-formal education spaces.

Dr Joseph Powell is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Divinity and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. His work primarily explores Rastafari spirituality as it is manifested in the Caribbean and the UK through ethnographic fieldwork which fuses anthropological and theological research methods. Joseph has written broadly on issues ranging from Rastafari responses to Covid-19 to the elemental apocalyptic language found within Rastafari inspired music. Joseph is a co-convenor of the Indigenous Studies Discussion Group at Cambridge and also Editor of the Methodist theology and praxis journal Holiness based at Wesley House'.

Steering Group

Professor Susan Robertson Susan Robertson is a Professor of Sociology of Education, and a Bye-Fellow of Wolfson College. Until 2022, Susan was Head of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Currently she is also a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Aarhus University, Denmark. Susan holds a B.Applied Science (Curtin, W. Australia) (Distinction), a B.Ed (Honours 2.1) University of Western Australia, and PhD in Policy/Sociology, University of Calgary (1990). Susan has held academic appointments in Western Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. She has written extensively on education policy, transformations of the state, spatial projects like region-building and globalisation, and social justice. She has published 14 books, and well over 100 academic papers in international journals. Susan is also the founding editor and currently Co-Editor in Chief of Globalisation, Societies and Education.

Jenni Skinner Jenni Skinner is the Library Manager of the African Studies Library, and spent the formative years of her career in librarianship at the Social & Political Sciences Library (2002-2015), University of Cambridge.  The African Studies Library supports the research and teaching needs of the University’s Undergraduate and Postgraduate study of Africa, whilst being recognised as a modern Special Collection as part of the newly formed World Collections Department at Cambridge University Library. Jenni is a founding member of the Decolonising through Critical Librarianship group, a representative on the Cambridge University Libraries Decolonisation Working Group, an advisor on the Black Student Advisory Hub Steering Group, and a SCOLMA Committee member.

Dr Charlie Barty-King Charlie works in community building, network management, engagement, communications, partnerships and events programming, with a strong technical background. He is the Sustainability Engagement Manager for the University of Cambridge and is co-founder and Director for the Resilience Web CIC. Previously, Charlie was the lead for the Interdisciplinary Research Hub in Sustainability & Conservation at Wolfson College, Cambridge, Green Officer Network Coordinator at Cambridge Zero, and completed his PhD in 2022 in Ultra Precision Engineering. Charlie's interests revolve around society and sustainability, regeneration of the natural world and a desire to be a net positive for those around him. He focuses on environmental, climate, and social goals with strong competencies in development, coordination and administration. "I believe in engaging communities at all scales, growing strong and resilient networks of people that have knowledge, action and care. I want to put my skills and experiences towards meaningful environmental and social outcomes."

Chris Burgess  Chris is the Head of Public Engagement and Participation at Cambridge University Library. In 2023 Chris curated the exhibition Spitting Image: A Controversial History working with members of REACH. Before Cambridge, Chris worked at the People’s History Museum in Manchester where he was responsible for the Labour Party archive and object collection. His research interests are in 20th century British politics, museology and the translation of academic research into public engagement.

Dr Stephen Wilford Stephen Wilford is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and Sound Studies, and a Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge. He is a researcher on the European Research Council-funded project ‘Past and Present Musical Encounters across the Strait of Gibraltar’ and a member of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement. Stephen’s work focuses upon the musics and soundscapes of North Africa, and in particular those of Algeria. His interests span a range of traditional and contemporary musics, from the region’s various Andalusi traditions to the Franco-Algerian hip hop scene. His research interrogates the intersections of music and sound within public and private spaces throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods, and is concerned with ideas of collective identity, cultural memory, diaspora, and the circulation of music and sound.

Dr Anna Dempster Anna is a Fellow at Wolfson College and sits on the Fine Arts Committee, informing the College's programme of exhibitions, events and acquisitions. She curates exhibitions for the college, private organisations and charities, both locally and internationally. She has worked with leading contemporary artists and as well as younger, emerging artists, and curated over 30 shows. Her exhibitions aim for a multi-cultural and plural approach, and are designed to generate discourse and debate and build bridges between academic community and wider public. Many of her exhibitions highlight social issues including race and identity, well-being and the environment – as in Under the Skin (2021) with Indian artist Gurpran Rau, which opened in the first weeks of relaxation of lockdown, in response to the murder of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement; Home, Taken (2021) with works by Yul Kang, reflected on the lived experience of housing discrimination and the draconian Section 21 allows for devastating “no-fault evictions” due to be repealed in 2024; Waste to Art (2021) in collaboration with the Sustainability Hub and Wolfson's Living Lab initiative, engaging both students and students to highlight issues of food waste and leading to transformative behaviours and change across the College. Another innovative exhibition, Kill or Cure (2022), was inspired by the impact that the natural world has on the medical sciences. It brought together world-class contemporary artists to exhibit alongside students, academics, and staff and included 32 works from artists across 5 continents. Patterns of Renewal (2023) explored issues of mental health, well-being, and the environment, and most recent Life within Landscapes: Caribbean-Cambridge Art Now, presented the work of three Black British female artists of Caribbean heritage, currently living in Cambridge. The first of its kind, the exhibition explored issues including gender and motherhood, the fragile quality of memory, and the impact of difficult colonial legacy on the lived experiences of individuals with their landscape – physical, as well as socio-economic, psychological and historic – which have shaped Caribbean culture and identity. Anna is passionate about creating a platform to showcase under-represented art and artists, people, and cultures and celebrate the positives of a world with both similarities and differences.

Dr Adam Welstead Dr Adam Welstead is the University of Cambridge's Head of Student Wellbeing, and a Fellow of Wolfson College. His professional experience and specialist interests are in cognitive behavioural therapies, mental health and suicide-safer strategy, communications and wellbeing in education. Adam has research and praxis interests in intersectionality, inclusion and belonging - particularly in their relationship to mental health, self-esteem and psychological wellbeing within organisations.

Ambassadors

I-Cubed consultancy group I-Cubed is a professional services company. Founded by two women with extensive corporate experience and business acumen, I-Cubed provides tailored solutions to enable companies to transform themselves. These include race equity transformational programmes, inclusion intelligence training, diversity & inclusion awareness training using our established frameworks, designing and delivering onboarding inclusive programmes for teams, providing and supporting agility and enterprise coaches as well as carrying out agile inclusion audits. In addition, I-Cubed also provides full change programmes that help organisations experiment and find ways of creating an inclusive agile workplace.

CB Mentoring CB Mentoring has worked closely with members of the community, including the University of Cambridge to provide life-changing experiences for children within Cambridgeshire. In 2021 we piloted our first Saturday School cohort with the support of Wolfson College, Cambridge. This provided tutors and a dedicated learning environment for school-aged children to focus on completing their homework and improving their core learning.

Selena Scott Selena Scott is a Cambridge-based artist who aims to redefine the portrayal of Black people using oil painting, a medium traditionally reserved to perpetuate western ideals. Extending beyond oil portraiture, Selena uses film, textiles and animation to navigate the Black identity through the lens of trauma, racism and colonialism. Her Caribbean heritage is what drives her creative process, using loaded imagery and colour to construct narrative. Her work builds upon extensive research, focused on investigating the legacy of colonialism through personal stories.

Dr Joanna Jasiewicz Dr Joanna Jasiewicz is a somatics-informed race equity educator, sociologist, and trauma-informed yoga teacher. She is the founder of Move Rooted. With a strong background in the sociology of race and racism and extensive experience in academia and the third sector, Joanna specialises in supporting individuals and organizations in deep, no-tick box work to recognise and address racism and oppression, both in our minds and bodies and the world around us. Previously, Joanna led the University of Cambridge's successful application for Race Equality Charter (REC) Bronze recognition. While at Cambridge, she delivered a highly regarded Race Awareness session attended by approximately 2700 participants. She went on to head the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Race and Ethnicity Unit and now supports other higher education institutions in their REC applications as an Advance HE Associate.

Our aims

Building on recent work at Wolfson under Let’s talk about Race & Racism and In Conversation initiatives, the REACH hub will deliver 3 Ps - to provide, promote, and publish research across its members and partners.

Provide

• Provide an innovative research hub that can be utilised for racially, ethnically and culturally diverse scholars in order to build capacity for researchers across all disciplines and sectors.
• Provide members with support, insight and information for their professional development in research.
• Provide resources for members regardless of their career stage to assist the dissemination of their research and praxis within their area of expertise.
• Provide networking opportunities that can attract the emerging generation of researchers.
• Provide the opportunity to collaborate with high profile stakeholders in order to diffuse research and secure funding.

Promote

• Promote and support applications for studentships and research fellowships for members within the remit of REACH.
• Promote events including reading groups, seminars, symposia, workshops and conferences in order to showcase research being conducted by members.
• Promote new paths to connect black led and black focused research across disciplines, colleges and faculties in ways that benefit the University of Cambridge more generally, and encourage the development of new perspectives that contribute to knowledge by establishing intercollegiate collaborations with other research groups, both nationally and internationally.

Publish

• Publish research activities of members of REACH through Wolfson College media and communications channels to spotlight the cutting edge work being carried out.
• Publish research conducted within the hub in our own journal, with the goal of making this an open access resource within the next five years.

 

Join us

We are open to all people - public, professional and academic. We are looking for individuals and organisations to join our events and contribute to discussions; create and support projects or events; donate financial or other resources. To become a member or to get involved please email us at reach@wolfson.cam.ac.uk or subscribe to our mailing list. 

Research Repository

One of the main aims of the REACH Hub is to act as a repository and dissemination point for research. It is a place where contributors can access and share relevant research and participate in an exchange of ideas.

Terms of Reference

See the Terms of Reference document.