Profile

Anna Numa Hopkins is an ESRC-funded doctoral student in the Department of Sociology. She is interested in the politics of knowledge, in particular in relation to race and racialisation. Her research draws on critical sociologies of race and racism, anti-colonial studies, the sociology of knowledge, and feminist philosophies and studies of science.

Anna's PhD is a study of collaborative projects that are making critical knowledge about race, racialisation and racism by bringing together scholars, practitioners and organisers with different but connected commitments. She is interested in what these projects can teach us about efforts to know and live in more liberatory ways. Anna is a 2024 Visiting Scholar at the History of Consciousness Department and Science & Justice Research Center at the University of Santa Cruz California (UCSC).

Outside of studies, Anna is a research engagement practitioner specialising in issues of knowledge inequity and research justice. She has spent several years working on (and thinking critically about) the social impacts of research, engaging organisations and publics in research, collaboration and knowledge sharing, supporting the use of research and expertise, knowledge inequities and (in)justices, and connecting knowledge and social action.

Doctoral Research

Anna’s PhD explores research projects in which scholars and practitioners make and share knowledge together, with attention to the politics of anti-racism.

The research addresses the practices, politics and ethics of knowledge making as these extend extend through relationships of collaboration and commissioning, to disciplines and methods, and with anti-racisms. Using mixed qualitative methods and drawing on forms of relational analysis and theorising, Anna aims to attend to differentiated relationships with and to race and anti-racism. Emerging themes in the research address qualitative ethics and anti-racism; the (after)life of racial knowledge and collaborative methodologies; the materiality of knowledge politics in engaged and public social sciences; and identity, experience and expertise in the production of epistemic authority.

Anna’s PhD is funded by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Studentship. She completed an MA in Social Research at the University of Warwick in 2017. She is supervised by Professor Hannah Jones and Associate Professor Sivamohan Valluvan, both in the Warwick Department of Sociology.

Current projects

Co-Investigator: ‘The Heart of Research: Exploring the Aims, Nature and Values of Education Research Centres’. Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre (DEAR), University of Warwick

Papers and Presentations

'Storytelling across unequal relations: counter-narrating state violence' (2024). Paper for University of Warwick Doctoral Conference.

'Storying anti-racisms: learning with speculative ecologies' (2024). Paper for 'work in progress' seminar, History of Consciousness Department, University of Santa Cruz, California.

'Live methods and public sociologies of race and racism' (2024) Paper for BSA Annual Conference: Crisis Continuity and Change, British Sociological Association.

‘Talking to people who know about race’ (2023). Paper for Confronting European Pasts in the Present, conference of the ‘Migration and Ethnic Minorities’ Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS), Technical University Berlin.

‘Knowledge injustices, international perspectives’ (2022). Invited Participant at Workshop ‘Knowledge mobilisation and epistemic injustice’, St Andrews University.

Academic positions

Visiting Scholar (2024) - Science & Justice Research Center and History of Consciousness Department, University of Santa Cruz California (UCSC)

Steering Group Member: Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre (DEAR), University of Warwick

Teaching

Anna is a Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant teaching on SO122 Sociology of Race in 2023/24

Research interests

Politics of knowledge; race, racialisation and anti-racism; anti-coloniality; engaged research; public sociologies; research ethics, methodologies and practices; sociologies of knowledge.