Writing up Grants 2026
Riya Al'Sanah
Riya Al’Sanah is an Economic and Social Research Council-funded PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Her research examines how financialisation processes intersect with ongoing settler- colonial dispossession to reconfigure space, class and social relations. Focusing on the case of 1948 Palestinians (Palestinian citizens of Israel), her work explores how expanding access to financial markets operates on unequal terms, embedding new forms of extraction and control within housing and everyday life. Beyond academia, she is engaged in Palestine solidarity organising and worker-to-worker international labour initiatives, focusing on building transnational networks, collective action, and practical resources for organisers and social movements.
Palwasha Amanullah
Palwasha Amanullah is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield. The architecture of her research is rooted in the temporal, focusing on the political potential of everyday life in bordered ecologies. She rethinks identity, mobility, migration, desire, and informal livelihoods in contexts of urban violence. Her concern with the border is to recognise it as a productive centre from which vital socio-spatial dynamics emerge. She has conducted fieldwork in Quetta, Pakistan’s frontier city. Alongside research, she has taught architecture and urban design in Pakistan and the UK across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
Sherin Assaf
Sherin Assaf is an architect and urban planner, currently a PhD candidate in Geography at the Université de Poitiers. Over the past decade, she has worked with academic and research institutions, as well as civil society organizations, on action-research, advocacy, and policy initiatives addressing socio-economic rights and local development in crisis contexts. Her doctoral research analyses the reconfiguration of food systems and planning practices under conditions of radical crisis within hybrid governance arrangements, focusing on the emergence, scaling, and impacts of alternative food models led by civil society in Lebanon.
Sandeep Mohan Badole
Sandeep Mohan Badole is a doctoral researcher at the King’s India Institute, King’s College London, working in political sociology, caste, and urban politics. His research centres on Nagpur, a city with a distinctive place in the history of Dalit political mobilisation, to examine the trajectory of post- Ambedkar Dalit politics in Maharashtra. Instead of treating this trajectory as a simple decline, his work reads it as a process of reconfiguration shaped by incorporation into dominant party structures. This has, in turn, produced new forms of fragmentation, sharpened intra Dalit competition, and limited the scope for autonomous organisation. Combining electoral analysis with archival and field research, the study brings together caste hierarchies, party systems, and urban governance to explain how marginalised political agency is being reshaped in contemporary India.
Polycap Chesifu Chebe
Polycap Chesifu Chebe is a Cameroonian and a PhD candidate at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He holds a Teacher Training Diploma in Geography from the Higher Teacher Training College (HTTC) Bambili, a Professional Master’s degree in International Cooperation, Humanitarian Action, and Sustainable Development from the International Relations Institute of Cameroon (IRIC), and both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Geography from the University of Yaoundé I. His doctoral research examines the relationship between urban street design, walking behaviour, and sense of place in Sub-Saharan Africa. His broader research interests focus on active mobility and public transport planning.
Parian Hoseini
Hilda Owii
Hilda Owii is a PhD candidate in Social Policy at the University of Bristol. Her doctoral research is linked to the university’s Perivoli Africa Research Center (PARC)’s Care Systems and Economies capstone research programme. Specifically, Hilda’s research examines understandings and anticipation of long- term care among care-independent older adults and their families in an urban slum in Nairobi, Kenya. The study aims to inspire national policy reflection on developing appropriate supports for preparation of care futures in slums. Hilda has a Masters degree in Gerontology from the University of Southampton and a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Nairobi.
Soheila Shourbaji
Soheila Shourbaji is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research examines questions of entification, parcelisation, and succession in the Scottish crofting land tenure system. The crofting case contributes to debates on public interest in land when land is intimately tied to social reproduction. Having researched a similar nexus of kinship and the economy in a publishing house in Beirut, Soheila’s work explores economic forms from book stock to livestock and the property relations that constitute them.
Photo credit: Gabriel Marques Camargo
Yuan Zhang
Yuan is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and a Senior Research Fellow at the Gulf Research Centre. Her research examines the political economy of the Gulf oil-producing states, with a particular focus on their evolving economic and financial linkages with China and the persistence of US dollar hegemony in a changing global order. Her work engages with broader debates on financialisation, global monetary regime, and the shifting dynamics of international economic relations. She works across English, Mandarin, and Arabic, and has a working knowledge of Persian.