Dr Ayten Alibaba, FHEA

Contact details

Email: Ayten dot Alibaba at warwick dot ac dot uk

Room: R 3.13 Ramphal Building

Student Advice and Feedback Hours (term time):

Wednesday: 11:30 - 12:30

Thursday: 11:30 - 12:30

Please get in touch with me if you would like to arrange an online meeting during my advice and feedback hours.

Please note that I am on a part-time contract and my working days are Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays are my non-working days.

My contract will end on 31st May and my last working day is 21st May.

Teaching Fellow

I joined School for Cross-Faculty Studies, Global Sustainable Development in September 2024 as Teaching Fellow.

In 2024/2025 academic year, I served as the Director of Student Experience (PG Lead) in the School.

I am an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests at the intersection of intercultural communication, space and place, identity and belonging, social sustainability and sustainable migration. I am fascinated with the interplay between locations, cultural contexts, and communication patterns. In my research I aim to shed light on the complex ways in which people create meaning within their environments and across cultural boundaries.

Teaching

In 2025-2026 academic year, I will be convening and contributing to teaching on the modules below:

In 2024 -2025 academic year I contributed to teaching on the modules below:

GD 307 GSD Dissertation/ Long Project
GD 106 Social Principles of Global Sustainable Development
GD 107 Global Sustainable Development (GSD) Project
GD 213:Achieving Sustainability: Potentials and Barriers

I am a Fellow of Higher Education Academy.

Research

Tracks of Change: Citizen Science Approaches to Social Sustainability in HS2 Corridor

Principal Investigator: Dr Ayten Alibaba

This project is funded by University of Warwick- Participatory Research Cohort Fund.

Tracks of Change is a citizen science and participatory research project exploring how the construction of High Speed 2 (HS2) is affecting everyday life, wellbeing, mobility, and sense of place in local rural and semi-rural communities.

While HS2 has been widely studied in major cities, the lived experiences of smaller communities facing long-term disruption remain under-examined. This project addresses that gap by working with residents and local councils to develop a place-based understanding of social sustainability and to explore how local experiences align with HS2’s stated social value commitments (e.g. wellbeing, resilient communities, environmental and cultural legacy).

Project website: tbc

The Transitional Space of Academia: Liminal Identities of Early Career Researchers

Principal Investigator: Dr Ayten Alibaba, Co-Investigator: Dr Harriet Richmond

Early Career Researchers (ECRs) face a range of challenges including identity insecurity, limited institutional recognition, uneven workload distribution, and emotional labour associated with precarious contracts. Despite growing interest in research culture, their lived experiences and the processes through which they negotiate academic identity and belonging remain under-examined. This project addresses this gap by exploring the liminality of academic identities and systemic inequalities that shape early research careers. Its overarching purpose is to inform institutional strategies that strengthen research culture, inclusivity, and support for emerging researchers.

The project employs creative, participatory methodologies to access forms of knowledge that traditional qualitative methods often overlook. Storyboarding allows participants to visually narrate significant moments in their academic journeys, while narrative visual mapping enables deeper reflection on transitions, aspirations, turning points, and identity shifts. These visual artefacts then act as prompts for focus group discussions, supporting collective meaning-making and the emergence of shared themes.

Project website: tbc

Countering silos and hierarchies through peer-to-peer research in progress conversations

Led by Prof. Richard Smith, with team members: Dr Ayten Alibaba, Dr Joana Almeida, Dr Gill Frigerio,ink opens in a new window Link opens in a new windowDr Andy Hind,Link opens in a new window k opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window Dr Yanyan Li, Dr Ida Hannah Lübben, Dr Pontso MoorosiLink opens in a new window, Link opens in a new window Miriam Schwiening, Lila Tennent, Yvette Yitong Wang

- Alibaba, A., Smith, R. & Wang, Y.Y. 2025. ‘Creating an inclusive space for research conversations: a critical reflectionLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window’. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 12(3), 186–202.
- Alibaba, A., Li, Y., Almeida, J., Frigerio, G., Wang, Y. Y., and Smith, R. (in pres.). From Purposefully Designed Peer-to-Peer Conversations to Inclusive Research Culture: Rethinking Interdisciplinarity as Intercultural Dialogue, Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal.

Project website: https://warwick.ac.uk/research/research-culture-at-warwick/counteringsilos/

"There are new faces here today." Negotiations of membership in modern diasporas - PhD Project

My doctoral research on diaspora communities focussed on themes such as identity, othering and (un)belonging, understandings of space and place and explored how members of the community make claims of (un)belonging and construct their identity through their perception of space.

- Alibaba, Ayten (2022) “There are new faces here today.” negotiations of membership in modern diasporas. PhD thesis, University of Warwick. http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3944012