My current research and field of practice concerns the relationships between race (understood as a racialised hierarchy of value) and development. This focus builds on three strands of research: (i) housing, land tenure and citizenship in the urban Global South, (ii) reflexive practice and postcolonial scholarship on the teaching and practice of ‘development’, and (iii) the application of a race lens to understanding and taking action for equity and justice. 

The first of my research strands is essentially concerned with the role of property in awarding, seizing, denying or contesting citizenship rights, which are sometimes expressed with recourse to national legislation or a moral reference to the right to the city. Specifically, my research has critically examined state-led approaches to low income housing schemes and tenure security in cities in the Global South, the effects of these approaches on individual and community wellbeing and realisations of citizenship, and the role of religious and/or ethnic identities therein. 

The second of my research themes, reflexive practice and postcolonial scholarship on the teaching and practice of ‘development’, is an essential part of my own scholar identity as a reflexive practitioner and teacher. Further to critical self-reflection on my career as a consultant and project manager within the development industry, I have developed a strong research interest in the processes and politics of ‘othering’ prevalent in mainstream development policy and practice, and the constructions of knowledge upon which development interventions are planned. I apply this critical insight to the teaching of development studies and research of development issues.

The third strand brings together ideas of race and its material impact with practices of equality, diversity and inclusion in different institutional spaces. This is an applied strand of research and thinking.