The University of Leeds

Faculty Member, Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

Other Affiliations: Universidade Aberta, CEMRI
London School of Economics, Gender Institute
The University of Leeds, Sociology and Social Policy

Lecturer in Gender Studies and Sociology

About

I am a feminist ethnographer with a background in Sociology and a commitment to interdisciplinary research and teaching in women's and gender studies.

I joined the University of Leeds in September 2011, after working as a Teaching Fellow on LSE100 at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Excellence in Gender Research (GEXcel) at the University of Örebro (Sweden).

I hold a PhD in Gender from the Gender Institute at LSE and a BSc+MSc (Distinction) in Sociology from the Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL, Portugal). 

My current research project is an ethnographic study of negotiations of the epistemic status of women's, gender, feminist studies (WGFS) in Portugal. By epistemic status, I understand the degree to which, and terms in which, knowledge claims are recognised as fulfilling the requisite criteria to be considered credible and authoritative. The project draws on feminist epistemology, Michel Foucault’s work and debates in science and technology studies to analyse how WGFS and non-WGFS scholars discursively and institutionally demarcate the boundaries of ‘proper’ scholarly knowledge and how they position WGFS in relation to those boundaries. Using a combination of qualitative methods (including participant observation in a range of sites of academic work and sociability, interviews and archival research), the project maps these negotiations, characterises their protagonists and the sites where they take place, identifies the resources deployed in them and examines their effects on research and teaching.

I have also conducted research on the negotiation of gender and sexuality among children and young people in school settings, feminist methodologies and pedagogies, contemporary transformations in higher education and science policy in Europe, men’s discourses about masculinity and fatherhood, and issues of language difference and translation in social science research. 

Contact Information