People

Rico IsaacsRico Isaacs is a Professor of International Politics at the University of Lincoln. His research interests lay at the intersection of authoritarianism, nationalism and populism with a specific focus on the post-communist space, especially Central Asia. Specifically, his research concerns three areas: the formal and informal institutional basis of support for authoritarian rule; the construction and contestation of nation-building policies and discourses; and the relationship between populism and ecological crisis. He is the author Political Opposition in Authoritarianism (Palgrave 2022), Film and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and post-Soviet Culture (Bloomsbury 2018) and Party System Formation in Kazakhstan: Between Formal and Informal Politics (Routledge 2011), as well as authoring several edited volumes, including the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia (Routledge 2021) and a Critical Reader in Central Asian Studies (Routledge 2022). He also co-authored an introduction to Politics textbook and has published widely in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is also currently serving as editor of the leading peer-reviewed journal within the field of Central Asian Studies, Central Asian Survey.


Nick CowenNick Cowen is a lecturer in criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lincoln. He studies the political economy of public policy and criminal justice systems. He is currently exploring the contributions of autonomous civil associations and commons institutions to democratic stability. He has published Hayek versus Trump: The Radical Right’s Road to Serfdom with Aris Trantidis in the journal Polity. His work has also appeared in the American Journal of Political ScienceThe British Journal of Criminology and Critical Review.


Andra Le Roux-KempAndra le Roux-Kemp is an Associate Professor in Law at the Lincoln Law School (University of Lincoln). Her research focus and interest are in General Jurisprudence and Legal Theory, and her primary fields of inquiry are Criminal Justice and Medical- and Health Law. As a transdisciplinary scholar with a keen interest in Critical Legal Theory, Law and Humanities, and Legal Research Methodologies, she explores the situatedness of law, and the theoretical and practical dynamics of legal change in its various spatial and temporal localities. She is currently working on projects relating to medical nationalism in the United Kingdom and post-colonialism and identity formation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Le Roux-Kemp, Andra (2018) A Legal-Historical Chronicle of Rule-of-Law Narratives in Hong Kong In: Global Legal History: A Comparative Law Perspective. Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group), pp. 158-175. ISBN 978-1-138-47849-7.


Christian KArnerChristian Karner is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences. Prior to this, Christian was Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Nottingham. He has also been a Leverhulme Special Research Fellow; a Research Associate in the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota; a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Political Sciences and History at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Athens, Greece); and a Senior Visiting Researcher in the Center Austria at the University of New Orleans. Christian has published widely in the areas of nationalism and ethnicity, memory studies, and urban sociology. His current projects include further research on nationalism in Central Europe, on the sociology of globalization, and on the interface of sociology and history.
Christian’s most recent book is: Christian Karner (2020) Nationalism Revisited: Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age, New York/ Oxford: Berghahn. (https://berghahnbooks.com/title/KarnerNationalism)

Aris TrantidisAris Trantidis is a Lecturer in International Relations and Politics at the University of Lincoln. He also serves as a member of the Academic Board of KEFIM, the Greek Centre for Liberal Studies. He previously held research and teaching positions at King’s College London, the European University Institute and George Mason University. Dr Trantidis has a multidisciplinary educational background in politics, law, political economy, European studies and international relations with degrees from King’s College London, the London School of Economics, Surrey, Athens and Thessaloniki.

His research and published work is on the pathologies of democracy, corruption, clientelism, autocratization and the resilience of democratic systems. He also has an active research agenda on the study of complex historical systems and how policymakers interpret and make use of the social sciences. He has written extensively on the Greek crisis and he is the author of the book ‘Clientelism and Economic Policy: Greece and the Crisis’ (Routledge, 2016).


Dr Yuliya HilevychDr Yuliya Hilevych is a historical sociologist with expertise in demography and public policy. Her primary areas of interest are gender, health, social relationships and inequities. She is especially interested in the study of uncertainty, justice and solidarity around biological and social reproduction, and how these are implicated in population, health and environmental policies.

She is currently a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Programme Leader for Sociology at the School for Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lincoln. Previously, she was a British Academy Newton International Fellow under the mentorship of Professor Simon Szreter at the University of Cambridge. Yuliya is also an affiliated scholar at the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (Cambridge), Fertility and Reproduction Study Group (Oxford), NIDI (The Hague) and the Radboud Group for Historical Demography (Nijmegen).

Yuliya is currently writing her book on the emergence of infertility and childlessness activism in the 1970s and 1980s Britain, and she is also editing a volume ‘Low fertility variations in the past and present: Studies in Compositional Demography’ with Dr Philip Kreager.


Edwin BaconEdwin Bacon has researched Russian politics since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He experienced first hand the disorderly politics of state collapse in Moscow in the early 1990s. He has published seven books on Soviet and Russian politics and history, including The Gulag at War (1994), Brezhnev Reconsidered (2002), and Securitising Russia: the Domestic Politics of Vladimir Putin (2006). His most recent book is Inside Russian Politics (2017).

In addition, Edwin Bacon has written numerous academic articles. His articles on narrative discourse analyse how political actors seek to impose order on events by the stories they tell. He has written too on the disorderliness of street level politics, as practised by the Putinite youth movement ‘Nashi’. And he has published a number of articles on forecasting and scenario planning, analysing the efficacy of different future-oriented approaches employed by academics, businesses, and politicians to address the contingent uncertainties of our world.

Edwin Bacon has worked at five different UK universities, and is now Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lincoln.


Dr Mike SlavenMike Slaven is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Lincoln. His research focuses on migration governance and the politics of security in Europe and the USA. His forthcoming book Securing Borders, Securing Power: The Rise and Fall of Arizona’s Populist Border-Security Politics examines the political sociology of why policymakers choose to treat immigration as a security issue, and how populist challenges to governing-elite authority over border security shape the securitization of migration. His research has appeared in journals including Comparative Political StudiesJournal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Journal of Global Security Studies. Mike is a former US-UK Fulbright Scholar. Before becoming an academic, he had a career in professional politics in the USA, including as a speechwriter for the US Secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama Administration.
Recently published:
Slaven, Mike (2021). “Populism and Securitization: The Corrosion of Elite Security Authority in a US-Mexico Border State.” Journal of Global Security Studies (early online).
Slaven, Mike, Sara Casella Colombeau, and Elisabeth Badenhoop (2021). “What Drives the Immigration-Welfare Policy Link? Comparing Germany, France, and the United Kingdom,” Comparative Political Studies 54(5), 855-888.

Joshua SkoczylisJoshua Skoczylis is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Counterterrorism Studies at the University of Lincoln. Joshua background is in Criminology and Criminal Justice. His research focuses on government policy around tackling extremism and terrorism. In 2015 Joshua published a book ‘The local Prevention of Terrorism: Strategy and Practice in the fight against terrorism’. He has also published a number of journal articles in Critical Social Policy, Critical Terrorism Studies and Millennium, as well as a number of book chapters on the topics of counterterrorism, security, tackling extremism and organised crime.


Sureyya Sonmez EfeSureyya Sonmez Efe is a Post Doctorate Research Associate and Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at University of Lincoln, UK. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political philosophy and ethics, human rights, migration studies and global justice. Her research focuses on the legal statuses and rights of migrant workers in contemporary Europe and Turkey. She takes an interdisciplinary approach in her research where she explores states’ and international organisations’ attitudes towards the legal status and rights of migrant workers and problematises the legal terminology that is used in policy documents. In her book, ‘Rights of Migrant Workers: an analysis of migration policies in contemporary Turkey’ (Transnational Press London 2021), she examined the evolution of the rights of migrant workers in state and regional policies, and international documents. She also published on legal status of seasonal migrant workers; the meaning of borders and migrant statuses; and rights and state responsibility.

Her current research include further work on employment and migrant workers’ rights in the UK, the digitalisation process on education and community dialogue, national integration and cohesion policies, and the impact of ethno-centrism and nationalism on migration policies. Sureyya is actively involved in Midlands Anti-Slavery Research Collaboration Group, and the Justice, Arts and Migration Network. She is in the editorial review team for Migration Letters and Border Crossing Journals.


James PattisonJames Pattison is a lecturer in sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lincoln. His research interests are in urban sociology, particularly concerning deindustrialisation, decline, regeneration, and territorial stigmatisation, focusing on smaller post-industrial towns often overlooked in urban sociological analysis. James’ research is informed by debates on race and class, racial capitalism, and whiteness, and the relationship between these processes and political subjectivities. Through his research, James has collaborated with a range of organisations including trade unions, welfare and migrant rights centres, and community associations.

James is currently an affiliated researcher to the Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time project (Concordia University, Canada) and to the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (University of Manchester). James has previously held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, and has worked as a Teaching Associate in sociology at the University of Nottingham where he also completed his PhD.


Marianna CharountakiMarianna Charountaki is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Lincoln (School of Social and Political Sciences). She has acted as Director of the Kurdistan International Studies Unit (2016-2019) at the UoL. She is a BRISMES trustee and convenor of the BISA Foreign Policy Working Group. She is Research Fellow at Soran University (Erbil, Iraq) and member of the Greek Council for IR. She has worked as consultant at the Iraqi Embassy in Athens (Greece, 2011-2012). Marianna has been researching the Middle Eastern region, in light of IR discipline, but also through extensive field work research (2007 to present).  Her research lies at the intersection of IR theories, foreign policy analysis and area studies with an emphasis on the interplay between state and non-state entities. She is the author of the books The Kurds and US Foreign Policy: International Relations in the Middle East since 1945, (Routledge, 2011) and Iran and Turkey: International and Regional Engagement in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris,2018). She has published articles in Harvard International ReviewCambridge Review of International Affairs, Third World Quarterly, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and others.


Jay EmeryJay Emery is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences. University of Lincoln. Jay completed his PhD from the University of Leicester in 2019 and was subsequently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leicester.

Jay’s research focuses on the dynamics of socio-spatial inequality, particularly the social, emotional and political effects of socio-spatial inequality in marginalized urban areas. These research interests most recently cohered in a comparative urbanisms project investigating processes of alienation in deindustrialising towns. A book of this project – titled: The Politics of Alienation: Genealogies of Class and Everyday Life – will be published by Manchester University Press in 2023.

Alongside colleagues at Sheffield, Jay is currently co-editing a special issue of The Sociological Review titled: Feeling Class: Emotions, Bodies and the Affective Politics of Social Inequality which will appear in March 2023. Jay has also published work in Human Geography, Social and Cultural, Journal of Historical Geography, Geography Compass and Frontiers in Sociology.


Adam BarnettAdam Barnett is a PhD candidate in the School of Social and Political Sciences. His research looks at Populist Ecologies, with a particular interest in populism and the international climate and biodiversity negotiations. He joined Lincoln in September 2022, after previously completing an MSc in Environmental Policy at LSE and BA in Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has spent several years working in the area of political lobbying in support of action on biodiversity loss and climate change, in various roles including for Friends of the Earth, the RSPB, DEFRA and the UK Labour Party.