Profile

Anna Numa Hopkins is an ESRC doctoral student in the Department of Sociology. She is interested in the politics of knowledge production, knowledge sharing and knowledge use, in particular in relation to racialisation and anti-racism. Her research explores forms of collaborative anti-racist knowledge production; knowledge sharing and democratisation; the politics of knowledge; and racisms, race-thinking and coloniality in academic research and higher education.

Outside of studies, Anna is a research engagement practitioner specialising in issues of knowledge equity and research justice in the sharing and use of research. She has spent 7 years working on (and thinking critically about) the social impacts of research, engaging organisations and communities in research, collaboration and knowledge sharing, supporting the use of research and expertise, and knowledge equity. She works with NORRAG to support organisations in education policy and practice to use under-represented and critical expertise to inform their work. She also works as a consultant on research and knowledge sharing projects, aiming to connect knowledge and action to support social justice projects in education, higher education and social policy contexts.

PhD Project

Anna’s PhD project explores how scholars and their collaborators produce and share anti-racist knowledge. It is focused on the knowledge politics and practices involved in making and sharing research that is oriented to social change.

Themes include how discourses about ‘race’ and anti-racism are (re)created, used and shared; relationships with the ‘publics’ of research, including collaborators and communities; public scholarship and scholar-activism; epistemic authority; and possibilities for democratising knowledge and expanding resistive research and knowledge practices.

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.

Research Interests

Politics of knowledge; politics of knowledge use; race, racialisation and anti-racism; collaborative and engaged research; public sociology; research methods and practice; higher education.