Race Equality and Inclusion Champions

Dr Ali Meghji is an Assistant Professor in Social Inequalities, having completed a research fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, a visiting fellowship at Harvard’s Weatherhead Centre, and a PhD, MPhil, and BA in sociology at Cambridge. He is the director for the MPhil in marginality and exclusion, the course organiser for SOC12 Empire, colonialism, imperialism, and the chair of 'Decolonising sociology'.

Currently, Ali’s predominant research interests lie in bridging the epistemological, methodological, and empirical divergences between critical race theory and decolonial thought. Through this research, Ali intends to balance the study of national racialized social systems with the global process of coloniality.

Professor Esra Özyürek joined University of Cambridge after having taught at the London School of Economics and University of California, San Deigo. She completed her PhD at the University of Michigan and prior to that she received a completed her undergraduate degree in Sociology and Political Science at Bogazici University, Istanbul. Her research agenda is to explore the tension between the universalism and particularism of globally appealing religious and post-religious belief and value systems by studying them ethnographically as they travel in and out of their assumed natural habitats. More specifically, as an anthropologist, she is interested in the personal experiences of individuals who embrace a universalistic ideology or belief system that they did not inherit from their grandparents, but instead choose to borrow from others and make their own, with a specific focus on Islam and Muslims. She is the author of Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe. Princeton University Press, 2015 and Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. Duke Univ. Press, 2006.