Dr Josephine Biglin
School of Health & Society
Current positions
Lecturer in Psychology
Biography
I am a critical sociological/community psychologist and joined º£½ÇÂÒÂ× in 2022. I have a BSc in Psychology, and an MSc in Research Psychology, both from Manchester Metropolitan University. I completed my PhD at the University of Manchester in 2022, where I now hold an honorary research fellow position and have spent time as a visiting academic at the University of Oxford.
I currently co-lead the Environment, Place and Society research theme within the Centre for Research on Inclusive Society (CRIS), where I also coordinate the CRIS research blog. I am the EDI directorate lead and coordinate the staff and student Decolonial Psychology reading group.
Throughout my academic career I have volunteered with the third sector with people seeking asylum and with refugee status and I am part of the University's University of Sanctuary working group as well representing the University on the º£½ÇÂÒÂ× City of Sanctuary steering group.
Areas of Research
My research examines asylum, race, place and wellbeing through participatory, arts‑based, sensory and embodied methodologies, informed by decolonial and feminist epistemologies. I investigate how refugees and asylum seekers experience place, care and displacement, including how community growing spaces and urban environments function as therapeutic and political landscapes.
I also explore political subjectivity and citizenship through creative participatory methods such as photography, analysing how people resist, reinterpret and remake narratives of belonging. Alongside this, I study the social construction of immigration, critically analysing survey questions and public discourses that shape and reproduce understandings of asylum seekers and the nation.
Areas of Supervision
Asylum; place; belonging; citizenship; wellbeing; creative participatory methods; politics; sensory ethnography.
I currently teach qualitative methods; social and community psychology; critical psychology; environmental psychology and media psychology.
I have taught previously Sociology and Criminology as a lecturer at York St John University, and Social Statistics as a TA at the University of Manchester.
My teaching philosophy is rooted in critical and anti-colonial pedagogical scholarship, recogising academia as a space where unequal access to the production and consumption of knowledge takes place but where the classroom provides opportunity to cultivate critical thought, dismantle power structures and transgress.
Qualifications
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PhD
2017 - 2021 -
Psychology
2016 - 2017 -
Psychology
2013 - 2016
Recognitions
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Visting Academic