Dr Grace Ese-osa Idahosa

I am an Assitant Professor of Education and Social Justice, at the Faculty of Education, Univerity of Cambridge and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Change, University of Johannesburg.

I am a political sociologist, an intersectional, and an interdisciplinary scholar with over five years of experience working on the construction of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, and their intersection with agency and social transformation in higher education. I hold a Ph.D. and a Masters in Political Studies from the Department of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University. I also hold a Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education at the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching, and Learning from the same university.

My current research draws on the premise that if universities are to contribute to societal development, they will first have to transform themselves. I employ a structure, agency, and transformation framework and a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to understand how individuals have the agency to effect transformation within their institutions. I apply this lens to various individuals within the university, including academic staff members and the university leadership.

This project explores how the reproduction and transformation of institutional structures, cultures, and practices occurs and the role individual and contextual factors play within such processes. In particular, I examine how structural factors like positions, rules, resources, norms, and interests, intersect with individual factors like reflexivity, consciousness, and engagement and identity factors like race, ethnicity, religion class, gender, and sexuality to foster reproduction/transformation within a specific socio-historical context. I possess advanced training in Political and Social Theory; Gender Studies and Feminist Theory, Agency and Social Transformation; Qualitative Research Methods; and Critical Studies in Higher Education.