Anna Numa Hopkins

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 is a Senior Research Fellow at Kings College London (KCL) where she works on sharing and implementing research and knowledge to address health inequalities. Previously she led policy engagement and evidence work at NORRAG Global Education Centre. In 2024 she was a Visiting Scholar at the History of Consciousness Department and Science & Justice Research Center at the University of Santa Cruz California (UCSC). Anna has spent over a decade 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, and knowledge inequities and (in)justices.

Doctoral Research

Anna's PhD is a study of the knowledge politics of antiracist public scholarship in Britain. Using the lens of storytelling, it explores how academic researchers, practitioners, activists and organisational scholars do complex knowledge work that contributes to re-making of ‘race’ far beyond the university.

Informed by sociologies of science, her mixed method study charts the negotiation of epistemic authority between actors in different sectors and within social science disciplines, the trials of evidence production in the context of postracial policymaking, and the contested (re)production of antiracisms. It also presents a series of collaborative knowledge practices (collaborative evidencing, collective archiving and counter-storying) and explicates central knowledge-political concerns. Her thesis contributes to our understanding of racialised knowledge politics through attention to how relationships between the social sciences, state and policymaking, and civil society, manifest in antiracist public knowledge projects in Britain.

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.

Recent projects

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

Student Anti-Racist Activism Archive ProjectLink opens in a new window, University of Warwick (Research Assistant)

Publications

Numa Hopkins, A. (2025) 'Stories of the changing same: the contribution of public scholarship to antiracism'. Ethnic and Racial Studies. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2025.2531304Link opens in a new window

Faul, M., Numa Hopkins, A. & Gabriel, B. (2024) '“What works”? Power and politics in studies of evidence use in policy' in The Rise Of Knowledge Brokers In Global Education Governance. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Hopkins, A., Oliver, K., Boaz, A., Guillot-Wright, S., Cairney, P. (2021) 'Are research-policy engagement activities informed by policy theory and evidence? 7 challenges to the UK impact agenda'. Policy Design and Practice.

Conference papers and presentations

'The social life of evidence about racism' (2025) Paper for Department of Education Seminar Series, University of Warwick

'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

Senior Research Fellow in Knowledge Mobilisation (2025-present) Policy Institute, Kings College London.

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.