About the group
The Solent Identities and Inequalities Research Group (SIIR) is a community of research-active scholars situated across a range of disciplines.
Our members’ research expertise includes, but is not limited to: gender, sexuality, disability, Global South studies, poverty and social exclusion, social and economic justice, youth cultures, sport and physical activity, and health inequalities.
We consist of staff aligned to numerous courses offered by Solent, including BA (Hons) Sociology, BA (Hons) Criminology, BA (Hons) Criminology and Sociology, BSc (Hons) Psychology, BSc (Hons) Criminology and Psychology, BSc (Hons) Football Studies, BSc (Hons) Sport Management.
We are a supportive space to further develop research ideas, work on collaborative funded research projects, peer mentorship and a range of other scholarly activities.
SIIR is chaired by Dr Rory Magrath and Dr David Webber.
Key themes
SIIR is a multidisciplinary research group with interest in a range of disciplines. As a Group, we are committed (albeit not restricted) to the following themes:
- Equality, diversity and inclusion
- ‘Lived’ identities
- Empowerment, activism and social change
- Cultural representation
- Power, policy and social justice
Who we are
SIIR is co-chaired by Dr Rory Magrath and Dr David Webber, and our membership consists of staff from multiple departments across the University.
Please see more, below.
Chairs
Rory Magrath is Associate Professor of Sociology. His research focuses on declining homophobia, and the subsequent impact on contemporary masculinities, with a particular focus on professional sport. He has authored, co-authored or edited eight books – including, most recently, LGBT Football Fans – over 25 journal articles, and multiple book chapters. He is Associate Editor of Sport in Society, sits on the editorial boards of Sociology and Managing Sport and Leisure, and and co-edits the Palgrave Studies in Masculinity, Sport and Exercise book series.
View Rory’s profile on Pure
David Webber is a Senior Research Fellow at Solent University and teaches principally on the BSc (Hons) Football Studies degree. His principal research interest lies in the political economy of football, and he has a growing list of publications in the often-intersecting fields of football fan culture, class, consumption, governance, globalisation, finance, British politics, and international development. Alongside this scholarship, David has made several media appearances and presented evidence to Parliament, addressing issues related to these areas of research.
View David’s profile on Pure
Members
Kola Adeosun is a researcher of educational philosophy, crisis and social change. His current research interests revolve around the intersectionality of race and educational development in sporting programmes of change as well as how crisis and migration challenges current educational contexts. As a result, Kola has conducted research in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America to understand educational attainment for minority groups.
View Kola’s profile on Pure
Karen Arm is a working-class academic with research interests in social justice and equity in higher education policy and practice. She is committed to understanding and addressing the differentials in academic experience and outcomes of university students from disadvantaged backgrounds
View Karen’s profile on Pure
Garfield Benjamin’s research and teaching focus on societal issues with technology. They are particularly interested in how our identities are constructed with and through technologies, as well as the many forms of inequalities that are produced through the inequitable ways technology is used in society. Their recent work has built on queer and intersectional critiques to examine social media platforms, AI, data, privacy and algorithms. Publications include articles on algorithmic protests and queer feminist critique of data practices, a report on stakeholders in UK tech policy, and Garfield has a new book with Bristol University Press on Mistrust Issues in technology discourses.
View Garfield’s profile on Pure
Karen Burnell, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, is a Chartered research psychologist and University Research Lead for Social Research and Social Policy. She specialises in exploring the psychological changes that occur throughout the adult lifespan, with a particular focus on how events in life challenge perceptions of the self (identity), the impact of these challenges on wellbeing, and how these challenges can be overcome through psychosocial and narrative interventions to improve health and wellbeing.
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Sophiia deFaia is a PhD student in the area of health inequalities and stigma for people who experience binge-eating disorder. She specialises in Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, with a focus on creative methods such as creative writing and artworks. Additional areas of interest include borderline personality disorder, lived experience of the paranormal, and witchcraft.
Chris Dunn is a senior lecturer in public health, leading modules over a number of undergraduate and master's programmes. Chris’s teaching focuses on World Health Organisation health promotion, the salutogenic orientation, the social determinants of health and health inequalities, obesogenic environments, and the healthy settings approach
View Chris's profile on Pure
Amy Duvenage is a lecturer in criminology whose research focuses on coloniality, narrative, gender and intersectionality, and thought from the Global South.
View Amy’s profile on Pure
Claire Fletcher is a lecturer in sociology. Her research interests centre on UK asylum policy, with a particular focus on the experiences of LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum and asylum housing policy in the UK. Her current research project is a collaborative project with European partners on credibility issues within LGBTQ+ asylum claims. Claire has previously worked in refugee rights organisations for 10 years.
View Claire's profile on Pure
Ahlem Lezerad is a lecturer in criminology and a researcher in home-grown Islamist radicalisation and sense of belonging. Her research interests also include young people, socio-psychology, ethnicity/race/religion, sense of belonging/identity, international radicalisation, White extremism, terrorism, global wars, and geopolitics. Comparative research is also an important parameter of her research interests.
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Brian McDonough has researched social inequalities linked to precarious work and unemployment, investigating how these might be overcome with changes to welfare and social policy. These ideas are most recently discussed in his co-authored text Universal Basic Income (Routledge, 2020). He also continues to investigate the use of automated technologies in the workplace and how these change social communication and workplace identities. See his new edited textbook, Sociology of Work and Organisation: A Global Perspective (also with Routledge, forthcoming in 2023).
View Brian’s profile on Pure
Shakiba Moghadam is a Chartered Psychologist and lecturer in psychology, with a specific focus on community psychology, and sport and exercise psychology. Shakiba’s research predominantly focuses on mental health literacy and athlete mental health, experiences of women athletes in male dominated sports, human rights violations in sports, and the experiences of marginalised communities such as refugees and asylum seekers. Shakiba is one of four leads on the British Association of Sport and Exercise Science’s SEPAR equality, diversity and inclusivity training workshops for trainee sport and exercise psychologists, and the chair of the British Psychological Society’s newly formed human rights advisory group. Shakiba is also a panel member for the Universities of Sanctuary and appointed trustee for three charities that work and support marginalised communities.
View Shakiba's profile on Pure
Donna Peberdy is Associate Professor of Performance, Sex and Gender in the Department of Film and Media, and University Research Lead for Media, Culture and the Arts. Donna is the author of Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and co-editor of Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversion (IB Tauris 2017). She is the co-director of Screening Sex, driving the establishment of an international research network, blog (www.screeningsex.com), special interest group for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, and book series (with Edinburgh University Press). Donna is currently co-editing the first two titles in the series – two volumes examining the sex scene in film, television and culture. Since 2018, Donna has been a member of the jury and selection committee for 16Days16Films, the first ever UK female film competition on gender violence and collaboration between Modern Films, UK SAYS NO MORE, Hestia and the Kering Foundation. Donna was recently awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to complete a 12-month interdisciplinary project: Screening Sexual Violence in the #MeToo Era. The project provides comprehensive analysis of current ways sexual violence is represented on screen, including the analysis of 80 short films about gender-based violence from six countries.
View Donna's profile on Pure
Catherine Phipps completed her PhD at the University of Greenwich in 2019, exploring LGBT+ inclusion in university sport. Her research focuses on gender relations, sexuality and gender identity in sport, and she has most recently been involved in work helping to tackle violence against women and girls (in sport spaces and more widely). She has presented at a number of national and international conferences and chaired the Leisure Studies Association Conference in 2021.
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Kamran Qureshi is an award-winning film and TV director and lecturer in film production at Solent. His research work on intersex includes Australian, Indian, American films and TV, Transgender Act 2018, directorial experience of telemovie Murad, a 32-part TV series, Moorat and Only Love Matters, the first feature film on intersex set in the UK. He has also made the world’s first research database (https://intersexdatabase.com) of intersex-related art forms, including films, TV, theatre, radio, and literature. His forthcoming book title is Fiction Filmmaking Practice Research.
View Kamran's profile on Pure
Esther Snell is a senior lecturer in criminology. After completing a BA (Hons) History and Music at Canterbury Christ Church University, Esther gained her History PhD from the University of Kent. Before coming to Southampton, she worked as a lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church and also Oxford Brookes universities. Esther then had a brief stint as a research assistant at the Open University, specialising in the history of crime and punishment and mentalities in the early modern period. Esther’s research is particularly interested in the representations of criminality and justice in the media.
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Before joining Solent in 2017, Adam Vaughan completed his undergraduate, master's and PhD in film studies at the University of Southampton. His research and teaching interests include performance in documentary film, animation, queer cinema, and intersectional approaches to screen representation. He is currently working on the monograph from his PhD thesis, titled Doing Documentary, Becoming Subjects: Performance and Performativity in Documentary Cinema. He has contributed chapters to edited collections on 21st-century European documentary, the historical biopics of Derek Jarman, sex in documentary cinema, and queer representation during the Hollywood Production Code era. He is also online editor for the Screening Sex network.
View Adam's profile on Pure
Events and activities
SIIR meet regularly as a network for peer support, including reading groups, writing retreats and collaborative research development.
Members are also involved in a range of other events and activities, including those aligned to learned societies and those linked to industry. Many members have successfully bid for funding from external organisations, including the American Institute of Bisexuality, Sport England and Royal National Institute of Blind People.
To view a list of events, please contact either of the group’s chairs.
Past events
International Human Rights Day – The Beginning of Peace and a Fairer Society
This event focused on how rights are the beginning of peace within societies, and ways to create a fairer society for future generations. Discussion topics included the current women’s rights movements in Iran and Qatar hosting the men’s World Cup.
The Future of Football: Mapping Progress and Alternatives football research symposium
This one-day hybrid critically examined the challenges and crises currently facing football and also mapped out more progressive and sustainable visions and alternatives that might reshape the future of the game.
Opportunities
We encourage and support new MPhil/PhD students whose research may align with the group. If you would like more information about postgraduate research opportunities, please feel free to get in touch. More information about Solent University’s research programme can be found here.
If you are interested in joining the Group, or finding out more about what we do, please contact us on: SIIR@solent.ac.uk or feel free to contact either Dr Rory Magrath or Dr David Webber.
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