Dr Romain Chenet

Email: Romain dot Chenet at warwick dot ac dot uk

Room: R3.16 (Ramphal Building)

On pronouncing my name / pronouns

Term-time* office hours: Click here to bookLink opens in a new window *In Term 3, please email me for a meeting. Administrative enquiries: UGGSD@warwick.ac.uk Optional: Push 'end' key for a note on ADHD.

Associate Professor in Global Sustainable Development

University roles: EDI Lead - School for Cross-Faculty Studies; EDI Chair - Arts Faculty; Staff Neurodiversity Champion; Warwick University Chaplaincy Interfaith Advisor (for staff / student societies); WICIDLink opens in a new window S.G. Member; Gender Equality Group Member; WIHEA Fellow (2025-28) and LiteraciesLink opens in a new window Learning Circle Co-Lead. Qualifications: SFHEA, PGA in HE Curriculum Design (Dist.); DPhil (in Sociology); MA (Dist.); MA (Dist.) and yes I have two but it's silly really; 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.

Academic profile

I joined Global Sustainable Development in 2018 and work most on teaching and administrative management, with past responsibilities as our 2021-25 Director of Undergraduate Studies (i.e., course leader), Senior Tutor, 2021-2024 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 (2025-2028). The latter reflects my ongoing commitment to build effective spaces for diversely empowered progressive 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 and embodied themes via poststructural policy analysis and other binary-disruptors, exploring subject-object +- other dualities within UN, IFI, and NGO discourse (from my specific positionality outward, with gratitude to Donna Haraway).

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 students who may find their doctoral aims too conditioned in conforming to narrowed disciplinary protocols.

Regarding doctoral enquiries: if you do email me, please share what's interesting about your work / idea, even if it's unpredictable, and don't share a long proposal. Meanwhile, show effort and have structure (or flex, depending on your default). In other words, most conventional development (e.g., uncritically 'global challenges' or technical solutions-framed) doctoral proposals are unlikely to interest me due to the depoliticisingly mechanical and responsibility-abdicative nature of much mainstream (interventionist) development programming (similarly to AI-written 'work' via its ideological performativity), but a strong idea might interest me regardless of your disciplinary background or initial expression thereof. It's truly not mean-spirited; rather, I just see little love or curiosity having been put into over-technical or too pre-conditioned ("buzzwordy") writing, and I wouldn't be a good supervisor for such doctoral students. Please also avoid AI use / styles in communicating with me, as I struggle with taking them very seriously. To indicate methods I support effectively, my degrees were from Social Sciences departments and I'm familiar with a range of qualitative project methodologies, alongside a longstanding focus on championing creative and artistic efforts / methods as rigorous research. Finally, if you're aiming to study more for a form of sponsorship than to advance an independent and meaningful scholarly / academic curiosity for your proposed doctoral topic(s), I am regrettably also unable to support such requests. If you're confident in your idea and have developed it well, however, I'd be happy to consider your initial thoughts and whether they may eventually be feasible for scholarship. It can take years, but certainly happens.

Current research

My ongoing research efforts involve, first, a slow-burning offering: this is my/your mythical reassertion and ontological reconcilation project (or 're-cept'), Darkmoon (website TBC). Second, I am pursuing an emergent EDI-related research focus on neurological inclusivity and intersectional exclusionary practices that can negatively impact HE students and other groups suffering from mental health disorders and/or neuro-disabilities (disclosure: I have both diagnoses, no interest in indulging stigma, and find the logical inversions and micro-exclusions that maintain our disabling worlds to be fascinating but navigable - if due to privileges I still can wield). Beyond that, I am committed to speaking out against (individual and institutional) bullies and working critically within mainstream societal rhetoric via discursive and visual styles, and am exploring the role of humour and comedy in (shock horror!) Global Development. I have some conventional written pieces below, if of interest. All these pursuits, with any chance, may echo my soft hopes for imperfectly interpreting the collective realities and/or delusions we're damagingly enmeshed into (often by design), alongside an ethical-moral solidarity with our many human (and non-human) groups targeted for extraction, dismissal, violence, and erasure. That's about it until I go on academic (study) 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 my core disciplinary footholds (Politics and Sociology of Development), I engage with British Sociological Association and Development Studies Association events too.

Personal histories

I was previously based in central London and worked in well-known global 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 extract and/or intend to diminish our embodied energies, so I left London and moved to an academic career. Further back, well, after living in Iraq and Singapore and before settling in Europe in my mid-teens due to parenting changes, I lived inconsistently (cf. 'homeless'), unschooled, and sometimes 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 as a 'Settled' European in the English Midlands. My personal interests include poetry, pre-colonial / medieval world art, cooking, gardening, an eclectic range of music, games, world cinema and other creative-cultural artforms, Buddhist philosophy and diverse faiths / ontologies, and living well with other species (I have cats, myself). 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 (sometimes research) interests

‘Sustainable Development’ discourse and its mythologies; Rethinking binaries, ordering principles (inclusion / exclusion), and subject-object dualities for human futures; Post-structural theory and applied methods; Power/knowledge capture, silencing, and erasure in (e.g.,) institutional policies and practices; Discourse analysis; Gender; Governance and power; NGOs and society; Environmental humanities, culture(s) and life-worlds / onto-epistemologies; Buddhist cosmological / non-dualistic revisiting of our calcifying 'impossibilities of counter-narratives under neoliberoligopoly'; Critical 'traditions' (post-development, feminist, alternative, post-/de-colonial, degrowth, queer, trans*, 'other'); Pluralism and decolonisation beyond buzzwords (via epistemology and ontology); The history, politics, and sociology of Development as an evolving global project.

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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

A note from Romain:

Thanks for reading! I have ADHD, a neurodevelopmental disorder / disability which impacts my emotions, experiences, interactions, and communications. I also have some ASD clusters. I work through it all but am human (don't go Hollow!), so please feel free to ask for clarity, speak directly with me to reduce any misunderstandings that may result from written communications, and (hopefully) co-create an authentically inclusive approach towards diversity. And, if in doubt, laughter is always the best medicine :) Learn more on ADHD's potential workplace impacts here.