Welcome to my little corner
Activist & Academic
I’m a lecturer in Childhood Studies and Children’s Rights at UCL, with a deep commitment to social justice and meaningful change for children and women facing violence.
Since 2011, I’ve taught at UCL and led modules including Children’s Rights, Sociology of Childhood, Education in an Age of Globalisation, and Educating Minorities, Migrants, and Refugees. I also co lead the Sociology Dissertation module at the Social Research Institute, and I’ve had the privilege of supervising exceptional undergraduate and postgraduate research across childhood, rights, and inequality.
My academic journey began with a BA in Philosophy, followed by a Master of Laws in International Law and Human Rights under Professor Bill Bowring. I completed my PhD in Human Geography and International Development at Birkbeck, University of London, based on an in depth ethnographic study of everyday violence in the lives of street connected girls in Cairo.
My work centres on violence, gender, rights, and recognition, with a particular focus on how marginalised children navigate both vulnerability and resilience under structural harm. I’m interested in what becomes possible when lived experience is taken seriously, and when the systems around children and women are challenged to do better.
Alongside my academic work, I contribute to policy change. I am currently a UCL Policy Fellow with Islington Council, supporting the development of their 2026 to 2031 Violence Against Women and Girls strategy. This work brings together research, survivor centred frameworks, and evidence based policy making to help shape a local response that is grounded, accountable, and built for impact.
I’ve also taught and lectured across the UK, including Manchester, Leeds, Roehampton, and Anglia Ruskin, and internationally in Morocco, Germany, Lebanon, Egypt, Dubai, and the USA.
Photographer
Photography is where my activism and healing meet. It is how I stay connected to people, to place, and to the quiet truths that sit beneath everyday life.
I’m drawn to images that hold something real: connection, resistance, tenderness, and of beauty that does not ask to be noticed, but stays with you anyway. Much of my work captures protest and resilience, those powerful and often fleeting moments where people stand up, speak out, and refuse to be invisible. Through my lens, I try to honour not just the politics of those moments, but the humanity inside them.
After years of working alongside street connected children and witnessing profound hardship, photography became a personal way to process, reflect, and make meaning. I especially love photographing children within their families, because joy, love, and belonging are not small things. They are life changing. I’m always drawn to the moments that show what care makes possible.
Street photography and animals also have a special place in my heart. The texture of a worn pavement, a cat watching from a rooftop, a shared glance between strangers: I’m interested in the overlooked and the ordinary, because it is often where the richest stories live. Light, gesture, expression, silence. Tiny details that hold whole worlds.
My biggest love though, is portrait photography. There is something deeply moving about helping someone see themselves with kindness. Hearing a teenager say, “Oh, I actually look nice,” and watching their confidence grow is one of the most joyful parts of what I do.
For me, photography is about attention, empathy, and storytelling. Each image is part of a wider narrative, one that makes room for resilience and tenderness, and reminds us of the layered beauty of being alive.
