Our maverick contributors

Beatriz Acevedo is a Colombian artist, writer and educator living in the United Kingdom. Beatriz' life purpose is to help individuals and organisations to reconnect with beauty and creativity aimed at sustainable practices, leadership and community development. She is holds a prestigious National Teaching Fellow Higher Education Academy, UK and works as a Associate Professor on Creative Education at Anglia Ruskin University. 

Ilaria Boncori is a Professor of Organization Studies and Humar resources amangement at the University of Essex (UK). Her research focuses on inequalities, diversity and equity in organizations and processes of organsining, mostly explored through ethnographic, narrative and arts-based methods. She is co-Editor in Chief of the journal Culture and Organization, and has recently published a book on ‘Researching and Writing Differently”. 

Anastasia Christou is Professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Middlesex University, London, UK. She is also Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, an academic activist, a trade unionist, feminist and anti-racist. An interdisciplinary critical scholar whose work is fully immersed in the humanities, social sciences and the arts in the pursuit of a public sociology which is relevant, meaningful and transformative, she extensively researches, publishes and teaches on issues of identity, emotion, inequality, intersectionality, ethics, decolonial and feminist pedagogies, social justice and exclusions as regards gender, class, sexuality, race and ethnicity in migrant, minority, youth and ageing groups, having engaged in multi-sited, multi-method and comparative ethnographic research in the US, UK, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, France, Iceland, Switzerland, while recently engaged in collaborative research in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, as well as with communities in Israel and Palestine. Anastasia’s recent poetry appears in the Feminist Review, the other side of hope: journeys in refugee and immigrant literature and Menelique. 

Rima Hussein is an Assistant Professor in Organisation Studies at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. She leads the cross-University research group of gender-based violence scholars and specialises in scholarship to better support domestic abuse survivors enduring court processes. Her writing centres survivors' lived experiences. 

Monika Kostera, is Titular Professor in economics and the humanities. She works as Professor in Sociology at Warsaw University, as well as Professor in Management at Warsaw University and Södertörn University, Sweden, and is affiliated with LITEM, l'Université Évry Val-d'Essonne, France. She has also been employed as professor and chair in the UK, including at Durham University. She writes and publishes texts on organization theory as well as poetry (www.koster.pl). 

Emmanouela Mandalaki is Associate Professor of Organizations at NEOMA Business School, and coordinator of the research group Inclusion, Diversity, Equality. Emmanouela draws on feminist epistemological inspirations, (auto)ethnographic and (post)qualitative methodologies, exploring questions of gender, ethics and inclusion in organizations. Emmanouela serves as Co-Editor for the Feminist Frontiers section of Gender, Work and Organization. 

Kasia Narkowicz works as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Law and Social Sciences at Middlesex University in London. She teaches across Sociology and Criminology. Her research is on migration, racism/racialisation and Islamophobia. Her research interests draws on feminist and decolonial methodologies. Kasia's recent publications include ‘White enough, not white enough: racism and racialisation among Poles in the UK’ (JEMS) and she is co-editor of the forthcoming book ‘Migration and Race in Central & Eastern Europe: Decolonial perspectives’. 

Harriet Shortt is an academic, researcher, and workplace consultant in the field of spatial change and user experience. She has eighteen years’ experience in researching and working with organisations exploring space, place, and the material world of work. She has expertise in qualitative research methods including visual, arts-based approaches to understanding user experiences of placemaking. She has worked with public and private sector organisations. 

Sam Parsley's research has traditionally centred on the aesthetic aspects of workplace life - conceptually through explorations of embodied and sensory modes of organizing, methodologically with the development of sensory, and visual methods, and empirically through studies of fun in the workplace, smell at work, and professional visual identities. Her most recent project (www.inthekey.org) explores the career experiences of women electronic music producers and DJs. 

Nico Pizzolato is an Associate Professor in Global Labour Studies and the Director of Postgraduate Research Studies at Middlesex University. He is the author of Challenging Global Capitalism: Labour Migration, Radical Struggle and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin (Palgrave, 2013) and of numerous articles that focus on the interplay between labour migration, race and ethnic relations, working-class self-activity, and political campaigns. He has co-edited Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World (Springer, 2017). As part of his work with postgraduate researchers, he runs seminars and workshops on writing and creativity in research. For further info: Writing Posts Thread - LinkedIn 

Stefanie Sachsenmaier is Associate Professor in Contemporary Performance at Middlesex University. Her research centres on the processual in creative practice, with a particular interest in the ways that performance practices extend into socio-political contexts. She is on the editorial board of Contemporary Theatre Review ‘Interventions’ and Choreographic Practices Journal. Co-edited publications include Collaboration in Performance Practice: Premises, Workings and Failures (Palgrave 2016), Critical Stages ‘Unstable Grounds: Reconfigurations of Performance and Politics’ (2021) and Performance Research: ‘On Solidarity’ (2022). She also published a series of writings related to her long-term research with British choreographer Rosemary Butcher. Her monograph Politics of Process in Performance is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.  

Joanna Średnicka is a sociologist, PhD in social sciences (management), organizational ethnographer, and at the same time an entrepreneur fascinated by humanistic management, which she popularizes and implements in the organizations she leads. She researches and analyzes cooperation processes in companies and organizations.  

Agnes Woolley is Associate Professor in World Literature at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published extensively on asylum, refugee arts, climate change and contemporary literature. She is a regular blogger on migration issues and works with grassroots refugee organisations in London.