Duaa Jamal Karim is a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge and a Trainee Barrister at the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn. Her work sits at the intersection of education policy, legal linguistics, and governance, drawing on interdisciplinary methods from Sociology, Philosophy, and Educational Theory.
Her doctoral research applies Critical Discourse Analysis and quantitative methods to examine neutrality and the interchangeable subject of security in British education policy, analysing how language and statistical framing shape regimes of governance and control. Her wider research explores the legal interpretation of policy, race, and identity embodied in counter-terrorism frameworks such as Prevent, with particular attention to their effects on educational practice and academic freedom.
She has published widely on these themes, contributing to both academic scholarship and policy debate. Alongside academia, Duaa has extensive experience in legal consultancy, finance, and governance, and previously served as Chair of Governors at a London state school.
Jamal Karim Badree is a legal consultant, researcher, and builder of systems that ask the law to do more. Based in London and working across borders, he moves at the intersection of law, political imagination, and moral responsibility. His work is rooted in a simple conviction: that justice, to be worthy of its name, must be felt in people’s lives, not just written.
Jamal holds a Master’s in International Commercial Law and is currently pursuing a PhD on the global politics of asset recovery. His research explores how law, often silent in the face of theft at scale, can be reclaimed as a tool of restoration for states whose wealth has been plundered and whose people have been left behind. This inquiry has shaped SovTrr, a sovereign-led platform for ethical asset recovery.
Professor Dr. Alison Scott-Baumann is Professor of Society and Belief in the Law Department at SOAS, University of London and a pragmatist philosopher with political science interests and psychology expertise. She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. She and her research team undertook a three-year AHRC/ESRC grant to analyse representations of Islam and Muslims on university campuses (2015–18).
With students and staff, Alison runs conversation groups about how to manage difficult topics. Current research is focused upon creating democratic networks to improve staff and student access to public debate, increase parliamentarians’ access to rigorous academic research and improve contact between students, academic staff and parliamentarians. Her team provides the secretariat for an All-Party Parliamentary Group in the House of Commons and runs live and online sessions on urgent topics with outside experts and SOAS academics.
Alison has published numerous papers in scholarly journals and six important monographs.
Professor Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. His books have been translated into thirteen languages and won three international prizes. He has lectured and broadcast on television and radio around the world.
He was the Director of CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) at Cambridge, and Foreign Secretary of the British Academy. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the European Academy. He is currently the co-director of the large-scale international programme Humanity’s Urban Future, funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He has sat on the board of institutes of research in Sweden, Germany, France and Ireland, and chaired panels for the European Research Council.
Professor Adam Habib is a distinguished university leader, scholar, and public intellectual, serving as Vice-Chancellor of SOAS University of London since 2021. A Professor of Political Science, he brings over 30 years of experience in academia, research, and administration across five universities and multiple international institutions.
His research focuses on democratisation, social movements, institutions, and inequality, particularly in South Africa. Before joining SOAS, he was Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), where he strengthened its global reputation as one of Africa’s leading universities. In the UK, Professor Habib has become a prominent voice on academic freedom, advocating greater sector-wide engagement with the evolving challenges of freedom of expression in higher education, while promoting open debate on complex issues and addressing growing concerns about self-censorship.
Tyler Denmead is Associate Professor in Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. He is also Fellow, Dean of College, and Director of Studies in Education at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He is the author of Rethinking Critical Race Theory: Education Against Elimination in a Time of Genocide (Palgrave, forthcoming) (co-authored with Amina Shareef) and The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race, and the Gentrifying City (Duke University Press, 2019).
Denmead serves as co-chair of the Art Education Research Institute and was selected as National PhD Supervisor of the Year in the United Kingdom in 2023. He also served as the founding executive director of New Urban Arts in Providence, Rhode Island, a nationally recognized arts community for high school students, artists, and educators.
Jo-Anne Dillabough is Professor in the Sociology of Education, University of Cambridge. She has been a visiting scholar at universities in Australia, Argentina, Norway, Finland, Italy, Portugal and Sweden and held the former David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education, UBC. Her work focuses largely on sociology of education; social theory and particularly the work of Hannah Arendt; the study of cxile, alongside history and memory studies; Critical Youth Studies and latterly, the Sociology of Higher Education. Dillabough has published five books (co-edited and co-authored) and published extensively in top tier journals in education globally. She is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled – Hannah Arendt and the Ambivalent Intellectual in a Changing Global Order and an edited forthcoming book entitled, Academic Freedom in Turbulent Times (with Elizabeth Buckner).
Dillabough was the former co-editor of Gender and Education. She works as a consultant to many organisations globally (e.g., UNESCO, CARA) and was the lead PI on a large scale ESRC grant, Universities & Crisis: https://universitiesandcrisis.org/about/. She has held the posts of Deputy Director of Research, the Chair of Knowledge, Power, Politics and is the current Director of the university wide Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crises and Political Transformation, University of Cambridge.
Gary McKeone is Warden of St George’s House, Windsor Castle. Originally from Derry, N. Ireland, he was educated at St Columb’s College and Trinity College Dublin. Before joining St George’s House, Gary was Director of Literature at Arts Council England.
Ideaspace West