I am a Bicentenary Research Fellow at the School of Arts, Cultures and Languages, University of Manchester, with a special interest in cross-disciplinary research, socially-engaged theatre, everyday politics of performance, solidarity and care ethics.

I am also a freelance theatre practitioner in socially-engaged performance, and have worked nationally and internationally with organisations that promote the rights of people with lived experience of forced migration. I am also a trained clown.

Recently, our co-edited book Care Aesthetics & the Arts was publish by Routledge (2025) (with Kate Maguire-Rosier and James Thompson). My monograph, Wild Play: the places where playfulness matters, is scheduled to come out in 2027 (Manchester University Press).

In 2022, I completed an AHRC-funded PhD investigated practices of play in public spaces as a form of civil disobedience, leaning on performance studies, play theory, and human geography. The work will be published as a book (2027).

From 2022 to 2025, I was Postdoctoral Research Associate on the cross-disciplinary (AHRC) Care Aesthetics Project led by professor James Thompson, which drew on performance studies, care ethics and health studies to propose a theoretical framework for the aesthetic, embodied and relational qualities of care. Case studies involved ethnographic fieldwork looking at relational care practices among care workers in London, healthcare workers and their patients in NHS secure dementia wards, artists working in healthcare contexts, as well as the care practices of community kitchens providing food and meals.

I am co-director of The Care Lab, a public engagement platform that launched in partnership with The Whitworth and that organises events, workshops and festivals exploring the artful qualities of care, and the careful elements in art-making. 

In 2025, I was awarded the Bicentenary Fellowship to lead a cross-disciplinary research project (2025-2028), ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Solidarity: How to Walk the Talk’ that draws on performance and cultural studies, care ethics, political philosophy and the emerging field of care aesthetics to examine everyday practices of solidarity in community organising in response to the rise of the far right in Europe. It explores its quotidian, relational enactments, and the role of spectators in shaping solidarity within contemporary times of ideological divisiveness.

I am the recipient of the Emerging Scholars Award (2020) Common Grounds, Arts in Society Research Network, and the New Scholars Prize (2021), International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). My research outputs include academic writing (articles, editorialship, etc) as well as public-facing events, workshops, talks and festivals.

My interests include the cross-disciplinary study of solidarity, in particular its everyday, ‘micro’ and relational practices within grassroots organising.

I am keen on collaborations and dialogue across disciplines in the humanities, and in providing a performance studies lens to everyday, social and political contexts.

My interests are in aligning academic research cultures with socially-engaged practices, and the role of researchers-as-activists.

Performance Practices (Year 1)

Theatre and Performance Texts (Year 1)

Performance Activism (Year 3)

Performance and Care (Year 3)

Ethics of participatory, community research (Masters) (*Visiting Lecturer)

Play and Practice-as-research (*Visiting Lecturer)