Meet the Organisers

Ajnura A. Akbaš (she/her/ona)

Ajnura is a PhD researcher at LSE’s Department of Gender Studies. Her research explores the intersections of gender and militarism within the context of Bosnian women veterans' lived experiences, through the lens of critical feminist historiography. Holding an MRes in History from Royal Holloway, UoL, she also contributes as an archivist and researcher for the War Childhood Museum, a transnational memory project dedicated to the experience of growing up during the war. She finds joy in exploring feelings and experiences through art making.

Research interests: critical military studies; feminist oral history; alternative archives; Bosnian studies; peace and conflict studies; feminist epistemologies.

Nour Almazidi

Nour is a PhD researcher at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Her archival, ethnographic, and oral history research focuses on stateless subaltern politics and epistemologies. Nour’s thesis explores theories of political subjectivation, practices of collective resistance, nomadic histories, and alternative imaginaries of citizenship. She has published an ethnography on queer lives and intimacies in Kuwait in Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. She is an Editor for Engenderings. Nour’s research, writing, and teaching draws on anti/de-colonial, transnational, feminist, and queer thinking directed towards liberatory politics.

Research interests: anti/de-colonial queer feminisms, death studies/the occult, SWANA studies, Gramsci/subaltern studies

Alia Amirali

Alia began her PhD in Gender Studies at LSE in 2019. Her dissertation explores political subjectivities of Pakistani domestic workers in Islamabad and the possibilities for collective action that arise therefrom. In addition to being fascinated by the idea, processes, and stories of ‘becoming’, Alia is interested in exploring prevailing theoretical discourses on politics and would particularly like to break out of 'poststructuralist' versus 'Marxist' versus ‘feminist’ binaries which (in her view) have debilitated, rather than strengthened, the fight against neoliberalism.

Research interests: class, gender, transformative politics, ethnography, becoming.

Malena Bastida Antich (she/ella)

Malena is a PhD researcher at LSE’s Department of Gender Studies. Her research project focuses on the exploitation of racialised and feminised labour in the Spanish informal economy of care through the lens of social reproduction theory. Malena holds an MA in Social Policy, Labour and Welfare from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2021) and a BA in International Relations and Chinese from SOAS (2020). She is a member of the Engenderings Editorial Collective.

Research interests: Mediterranean care regimes; political economy of care and domestic labour; racialised and gendered sectoral and occupational segregation; labour movments.

Zuzana Dančíková (she/her)

Zuzana recently submitted her PhD thesis at the LSE Department of Gender Studies in which she investigates the Slovak daddy quota as a part of the gender structure. Her research focus is on the intersection of policy, gender and family and she is particularly interested in the Central and Eastern European context. Zuzana enjoys exploring the world through reading, eating and walking anywhere.

Research interests: policy, gender, family, care, social reproduction

Luma Mantilla Garino (they/elle/ella/él)

Luma is a PhD researcher at LSE’s Gender Department. Their research examines the sense-making practices and onto-epistemic registers of disidencias sexo-genéricas (sex-gender dissident politics) in Quito, Ecuador. Luma holds an MA in Social Policy from Sciences Po Paris and a BA from Wesleyan University, and is a member of the Engenderings Editorial Collective. They enjoy painting, creative writing, wild swims, hiking, playing with friends/lovers, terrazas al sol y garitos de mala muerte con perreo intenso.

Research Interests: marika & sex-gender dissident politics in Abya Yala, coloniality, Whiteness/mestizaje, world-making, queer of color critiques, perreo, anti-productivism.

Lizzie Hobbs (she/her)

Lizzie is a final year PhD student in the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. Her research focuses on borders, carcerality and abolition in the context of the UK’s ‘Hostile Environment’ and the (after)lives of austerity. She specifically thinks through how race and coloniality construct - and are constructed by - discourses on migrant masculinities and the work these logics do to reaffirm racial bordering. This work focuses on the inseparability of discourses on masculinities, process of racialisation, criminalisation and carceral-borderwork. Lizzie continues to work as an immigration caseworker in the migrant right’s sector in East London and is part of several activist and organising spaces.

Research interests: abolition; carceral-borders; post/anti-coloniality; racial capitalism; masculinities; queer theory; processes of race-making/racialisation in the UK; far-right resistance.

Ting-Sian Liu (she/they)

Ting-Sian is a PhD researcher at LSE’s Department of Gender Studies. Their research explores Indigenous queer subjects and queer activism in Taiwan, analysing how racial injustice intersects with gender and sexuality through the lens of settler colonialism. Ting-Sian holds an MA in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London and a BA in Anthropology from National Taiwan University, and is a member of the Engenderings Editorial Collective.

Research interests: Indigenous decolonisation, queer settler colonialism, Tongzhi (LGBTQ+) movements, decolonial and transnational feminisms

Magda Muter (she/her)

Magda started her PhD at the Department of Gender Studies in 2017, examining the process of couples’ decision making regarding division of labour, both on labour market and in the household. Her work focuses on heterosexual couples in contemporary Poland, having their first child. Therefore she also examines the Polish context, including possibilities for outsourcing childcare. She explores how the existing care gap for children aged 1-3 years old and gendered division of labour in the households affect possibilities of mothers on the labour market, reinforcing existing gender inequalities.

Research interests: inequalities, gender, parental employment, domestic labour, negotiations, project management

Senel Wanniarachchi (he/him)

Senel is a final year PhD Researcher at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. His research is interested in understanding how discourses on ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ are instrumentalised in frameworks that are anti-imperialist, but also nationalist, patriarchal, heteronormative and anti-human rights in the postcolony. Senel is the Research Coordinator for the AHRC Project on Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions. His research has appeared in the Cultural Politics Journal and is set to appear in the upcoming Handbook on Contemporary Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, Senel co-founded an activist organisation called Hashtag Generation which works in the intersections of human rights and technology.

Research interests: postcoloniality, nationalism studies, affect theory, animality, critical archival studies