Dr Romain Chenet
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| Email: Romain dot Chenet at warwick dot ac dot uk |
| Room: R3.16 (Ramphal Building) |
| On pronouncing my name / pronouns |
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Term-time* office hours: Click here to bookLink opens in a new window Administrative enquiries: UGGSD@warwick.ac.uk Optional: See end of page for a note on ADHD! |
Associate Professor in Global Sustainable Development
Current UoW roles: EDI Lead - School for Cross-Faculty Studies; EDI Chair - Arts Faculty; Neurodiversity Champion; Chaplaincy Buddhist Faith Advisor; WICID Steering Group Member; Gender Equality Group Member; WIHEA Fellow (2025-28) and Co-Lead of (Academic) LiteraciesLink opens in a new window Learning Circle. Qualifications: SFHEA, PG Award in Curriculum Design (Dist.); DPhil (in Sociology), MA (Dist.); MA (Dist.); BA (1st w/ Hons.); And: never too busy for a hello.
Note: I am on Study Leave during Terms 2 and 3 of 2026-2027.
Background
I joined Global Sustainable Development in 2018 and work most on teaching and administrative management, with past responsibilities as our Director of Undergraduate Studies, Senior Tutor, Director of Admissions, and Director of Student Experience. I presently serve as our School's Equity Officer and co-chair the Arts Faculty EDI function. The latter reflects my ongoing commitment to build effective spaces for diversely empowered human experiences to emerge from, in line with my lived aims as a Mahāyāna (and Vajrayana) Kagyu Buddhist. As an early-career researcher (2023 PhD), my efforts have spanned development, sociology, and politics to query global themes via poststructural policy analysis and other binary-disruptors, exploring subject-object +- other dualities within UN, IFI, and NGO discourse.
I am now exploring novel, creative, and alternative research directions and critical pedagogies in/beyond the Arts and Social Sciences, galvanising my curiosity for the emerging field of global studies and 'undisciplinary' (or polymathic) explorations in addition to interdisciplinary dialogic approaches and post-qualitative methods. In preferring invention to innovation, I have diverse interests in critically-impactful scholarship, and invite enquiries from prospective doctoral students who may find their aims for scholarly capacity too constrained in conforming to narrowed disciplinary protocols. Be interesting, or at least slightly unpredictable! Meanwhile, show effort and have structure (or flex, depending on your default). In other words, conventional development (e.g., 'global challenges') doctoral proposals are unlikely to interest me due to the mechanical, de-realised, and responsibility-abdicative nature of much mainstream (interventionist) development programming (similarly to AI-written 'work'), but a strong idea might interest me regardless of your disciplinary background or initial proposal. It's not mean-spirited, I just see little love or curiosity put into over-technicalised or too pre-conditioned ("buzzwordy") writing, and I wouldn't be a good supervisor for it. To indicate methods I can support effectively, my degrees were from Politics and Sociology departments and I'm familiar with supervising a range of qualitative project methodologies, alongside a longstanding focus on championing creative and artistic efforts as rigorous research.
My ongoing research involves, first, a small Impact-funded mythical reassertion and ontological reconcilation project entitled Darkmoon (zines, website, and perhaps even merchandise under construction / subject to further funding). Second, I am pursuing an emergent EDI-related research focus on neurological inclusivity and exclusionary practices that negatively impact students and other groups suffering from mental disorders and/or disabilities (disclosure: I have both types of diagnoses, no interest in indulging stigma, and find the logical inversions and micro-exclusions that maintain our disabling worlds to be fascinating). Beyond that, I quite enjoy working within mainstream societal rhetoric via discursive and visual styles. Such pursuits echo my soft hopes for imperfectly interpreting the collective realities and/or delusions we're damagingly enmeshed into (often by design), alongside an ethico-moral solidarity with groups targeted for extraction, violence, and erasure. That's about it until I secure research leave, as my contract is only 10% research. I am also a co-founder of the Midlands Conference in Critical ThoughtLink opens in a new window and hosted it in 2026. It was great, do join next time as it's always free! To maintain a soft footing in Development Studies and thus generative criticality thereto, I engage with DSALink opens in a new window events too.
I was previously based in central London and worked in large NGOs to fund long-term development projects and urgent humanitarian disaster responses. There, I specialised in high-value fundraising management and worked with executive colleagues across multinational companies to deliver corporate responsibility programming in relevant markets. It was decent but discomforting work given the aid sector's structured limitations and downstream power-knowledge positioning vis-à-vis the entrenched Capital-Cthulhu interests that generally intend to diminish our embodied energies, so I left London and moved to an academic career. After living in Iraq and Singapore and before settling in Europe in my late teens due to parenting changes, I lived inconsistently (cf. 'homeless'), unschooled, and often malnourished amidst the poverty of South and South-East Asia (Nepal, Sikkim, Thailand, and finally Cambodia). All this and more shapes my complex lived experiences with and elastic mindsets on 'progress' and 'development' across communities, which I'm passionate about learning and teaching about. My interests include poetry, pre-colonial / medieval art (thangkas included), cooking, gardening, an eclectic range of music, games, cinema, and other creative-cultural artforms, Buddhist art, philosophy, and faith (I also volunteer with the Chaplaincy), and then just living well with cats and other species. Say hello if you wish to and, if not, be well!
Taught modules
Undergraduate:
Sustainable Development: Past, Present, FuturesLink opens in a new window (Convening Lecturer)
Surviving the ApocalypseLink opens in a new window (Convening Lecturer)
Aid, Humanitarianism, Sustainable Development, and NGOsLink opens in a new window (Convening Lecturer)
Gender and the Sustainable Development AgendaLink opens in a new window (Convening Lecturer)
Postgraduate:
Leading Transformation in the AnthropoceneLink opens in a new window (Convening Lecturer)
Teaching and research interests
‘Sustainable Development’ discourse and its mythologies; Rethinking binaries, ordering principles (inclusion / exclusion), and subject-object dualities for human flourishing; Post-structural theory and applied methods; Buzzwords, silences, power/knowledge capture and erasures in (e.g.,) institutional policies and practices; Discourse analysis; Gender; Governance and power; NGOs and civil society; Environmental humanities, culture(s) and intersecting life-worlds / onto-epistemologies; Buddhist cosmology / non-dualism as counter-narrative; Critical 'traditions' (post-development, feminist, alternative, post-/de-colonial, degrowth, queer, trans*, and other); Pluralism and decolonisation beyond buzzwords (via epistemology and ontology); The history, politics, and sociology of 'Development' as an evolving global project.
Recent publications
Chenet, R. (2025). Inscribed capital, human bodies: Interpellating contemporary World Bank expressionsLink opens in a new window. In: Crisis and body politics in twenty-first century cultural production, (eds. Sinclair, M. and Spear, C.). New York: Routledge.
Chenet, R. (2024). Gendered visions beyond development’s impasses: reflections from a UK university classroom. Development in Practice, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2024.2363931
Selected conference events
Panel organiser/presenter (with Dr M. Gavris): Renewals: exploring diverse meanings of ‘development’ in our shared polycrisis.
Panel organiser (with Dr E. Loveman): From oblivion to re-enchantment: Exploring and actualising diverse knowledges. Midlands Conference in Critical Thought 2025, University of Derby.
Paper: Building intersectional space(s) into ‘gender and development’ teaching.
A note from Romain:
Thanks for reading! I have ADHD, a neurodevelopmental disorder / disability which impacts my emotions, experiences, and interactions. I also have some ASD clusters. I work through it all but am human (don't go Hollow!), so always freely ask for clarifications, speak directly with me to reduce misunderstandings, and (hopefully) co-create an authentically inclusive approach toward our manifestations of diversity. Learn more on ADHD's potential workplace impacts here.