Conference Team 2024

Meet this year's Conference Team

Mel Williams (she/her)

Mel is a second year PhD Student based in the Department of Politics at the University of York. The current working title for her PhD is: ‘We are Here to Stay Inna Inglan: Britain’s Immigration Regime, Contingent Status and Belonging Amongst Windrush Descendants of Jamaican Heritage’.

Alongside her studies, Mel is also involved in community work and activism, mostly focussed on social justice, anti-racism, access to justice, and ‘Windrush’. Mel is a trustee at her local Citizens Advice and Law Centre, Co-founder and member of the ‘Anti-Racism Working Group’ based at the University of York, EDI Consultant at the Anthony Walker Foundation and an active member of various regional anti-racism focussed organisations. Mel particularly believes in the importance of connecting activism with research, legal practice and the arts to trigger necessary change, and has worked with the rest of the conference team to create this interdisciplinary space for PhD students and ECRs.

Susy Williams (she/her)

Susy is a second year PhD student, based in the University of York Politics and International Relations Department. Her research is focused on gendered and colonial injustices in the UK garment industry, and connects human and environmental forms of exploitation. She adopts critical approaches to her research including a postcolonial feminist lens, racial capitalism framework and using disruptive research methodologies.

Susy started working with the Anti-Racism Working Group in early 2022, through which radical friendships were formed: As a collective community, we have run various events, including research training on the centrality of positionality and reflexivity. We felt it was crucial to create an open and inclusive space for PGRs and ECRs whose research is socially engaged and relating to 'race', given that conferences can often be unwelcoming spaces for both early careers and race-focused, critical research.

Firdes Ali

Firdes is a PhD Candidate, based in the department of English Literature at York St John University. Her research is looking at the relationship between mental illness, race and gender specifically focused on Caribbean Women in Contemporary English Literary Texts. She believes that literature is a reflection of humanity and it functions in society as a continuing symbolic criticism of values. Alongside her studies, Firdes has started working with the Anti-Racism Working Group for the first and second annual ‘Race and Socially Engaged Research Conference’.

Limor Augustin (she/her)

Limor is a woman of colour of Brasilian Heritage whose positionality is influenced by a number of cultures which she is to varying degrees part of or adjacent to. This includes collectivist, Kibbutz culture, some Caribbean and Middle Eastern influences and of course English culture through living and working in the UK. She is new to the work of disrupting coloniality and is two years into a process of unlearning and rediscovering elements of her heritage, values and identity that she was previously encouraged and taught to set aside. She recognises that the path of her learning journey was paved with the work of others who came before her and laboured to share their knowledge. She also recognises that in some respects she benefits from the systems of harm that her work undertakes to disrupt.

She is a mother and a member of a number of diverse communities and is committed to ensuring that her research, teaching and community work contributes to increasing equity and safety for individuals and groups that are impacted by systemic inequalities.

Katie Heffron (she/her)

Katie, a part-time PhD student at the University of York's Department for Education, is investigating how university staff build their capability for contributing to decolonising knowledge efforts. Her research involves facilitating dialogue with staff to explore colonial legacies within institutional structures and how they influence everyday practices. Additionally, Katie works as a Capacity and Policy Engagement Officer for York’s Policy Engine, where she manages a growing training portfolio aimed at supporting staff and students to build the internal capacity for policy engagement at York.

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