Research projects
Explore current and recent research projects held by members in the Department, funded by grants from major research councils and funding bodies.
Current Grants and Projects
Recent Grants and Projects
An innovative research collaboration with the goal of delivering an authentic community-driven narrative on how it feels to be Black and British. The first BBVP report provides a nuanced and comprehensive account of the experience of being Black in Britain, combining a national survey of 10,000 Black Britons with in-depth interviews of leading Black British commentators, including politicians, celebrities, writers, journalists and businesspeople.
This project explored the effects of industrial mining in the reproductive lives of humans, animals and the land to expand our understanding of reproduction beyond the narrow model of the individual and biological human reproductive cycle that has traditionally constrained this body of scholarship. The goal was to develop a framework to understand how human reproduction is deeply interrelated with other beings' reproduction and show the analytic possibilities that reproduction offers for probing broader socio-economic processes, such as extractivism.
ReproSoc's research covered a broad range of topics including the history of IVF, ‘repronationalism’, reproduction and the environment, reproductive justice, visual cultures of reproduction, non-heterosexual parenting aspirations, regenerative medicine, the IVF-stem cell interface, racialized reproduction, and reproductive inequality. Their aim was to develop more generalizable claims about, for example, changing definitions of nature and ethics, the biologization of technology, translational biomedicine, and the political economy of reproduction.
As the new public health threat of COVID-19 became apparent, governments around the world drew on experts to define the most appropriate policy response to protect population health as well as key economic and social activity. In addition to formal advisory groups convened by governments, experts in some countries formed alternative groups to offer advice on various aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. This project investigated the role of these alternative expert groups in managing the COVID-19 pandemic in March-November 2020 in the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic.
Recent movements against sexual violence such as #MeToo and mass mobilizations in many countries of the global South have brought global attention to violence against women. It was an opportune time to put forward a bold and innovative research agenda that addressed why, despite decades of legislation and policy efforts, violence against women remains so high. The vision of this project was to develop a blueprint for a new generation of scholarship on gendered violence, specifically in this case public and private sexual violence.
This EC-funded research project assessed how grassroots citizen scientists in three world regions (East Asia, Western Europe, Central Africa) mobilise new data devices and technologies to tackle environmental threats; and how formal institutions respond to citizen-driven environmental data practices.
A vital research hub which aimed to build research and policy capacities and capabilities for the academics and policy makers in the Middle East and North Africa region. This four-year programme brought together multiple disciplines, academics and policy makers to develop research training and collaborations between Middle East and UK universities in order to address the major public policy and health challenges arising from ongoing conflicts and humanitarian crises. The project focused on areas of the political economy of health and healthcare, mental health, and non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes and auto-immune conditions.
The programme involved a collaboration of researchers from the University of Cambridge, King’s College London and Imperial College London in the UK and Birzeit University, Hacettepe University (Turkey), King Hussein Cancer Centre (Jordan) and the America University Beirut (Lebanon). These academic institutions worked in partnership with Government, International and NGO partners, such as the World Health Organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Agency for Research in Cancer to deliver the programme.
How do new diagnostic tests find their way into practice? What are the relative roles of industry and the public sector in the discovery, development and adoption of new biological markers of disease? There is an extensive body of interdisciplinary research on the political economy of pharmaceutical innovation, and the role of drug firms as corporate “engines of medicalisation”, but we know relatively little about the part played by diagnostics firms in bringing new technologies into routine clinical practice, or their impact on the creation of new disease categories. Building on previous research by Dr Stuart Hogarth and collaborators, this project addressed this empirical gap and provided a new conceptual framework for understanding the changing dynamics of diagnostic innovation.
Sarah Franklin was the principal investigator of this British Academy-funded project, which ran from May 2012 to May 2022. This project explored the history of IVF using archival and interview sources, as well as through analysis of media representations and ethical debate. The aim was to provide a historical sociology of IVF as a human tool.
Monica Moreno Figueroa was the principal investigator of this ESRC-funded project, which ran from January 2017 to December 2018. This project investigated anti-racist practices and ideologies in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The project contributes to understand the growing interest in addressing problems of racism and racial inequality in the region.