Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
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Head of Politics awarded prestigious research funding
Dr Price has won a £58,884 Leverhulme Research Fellowship for a project beginning in October 2023, entitled ‘Where are the Women? Informal traders and Pan-African Trade Liberalisation’.
Dr Price explained: “My new project will explore the role of women in informal cross-border trade, how they have been considered in the recently negotiated African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), and the potential impact of trade liberalisation on their lives and livelihoods.
“The award will allow me to carry out important archival work and interviews with policymakers at key institutions that underpin regional economic integration and trade liberalisation in Africa - and also interview the women engaged in cross border trade.”
In 2021, Dr Price was awarded a British Academy Writing Workshop fund to create an online programme of support and training for early career researchers and postgraduate students in African universities. She has now successfully won another British Academy award of £29,968 for a further two-year project, which began in March 2023 and will be completed in 2025.
Dr Price said: “Our first award allowed us to build research networks and collaborations across Europe and Africa focused on the political economy of inequality in Africa. We created a programme of online workshops, a policymaker conference, and a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) to provide open access resources and training that are freely available to all.
“The new award will be an extension of this, allowing us to create both online and face-to-face workshops in Nigeria and South Africa, to support the ongoing career development of both our original cohort and a new cohort of participants.”
The project directly addresses the challenges facing many African universities, including increasing class sizes, and the increasing movement of academic staff to other countries. There have been numerous initiatives to support research capacity building in Africa - but these efforts have largely focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), with relatively fewer opportunities for research collaborations and capacity building in the social sciences.
Our initial project has laid the foundations for ongoing research networks and partnerships – and our conference in March 2022 provided an important opportunity for participants to disseminate their research and share their ideas with a wide audience. With this new funding, we are looking forward to building on this success and creating further opportunities to advance researchers’ careers in social sciences in Nigeria and South Africa.
Dr Price has also been awarded a Letsema Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute of Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC) at the University of Johannesburg, which will take place over the summer of 2023. Alongside conducting new research, Dr Price will develop research and teaching partnerships and support the development of IPATC’s new Pan-African Women’s Studies Unit.
In this article
Dr Sophia Price
Sophia Price is Head of Politics and International Relations at Leeds Beckett University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She previously worked for the Open University and the University of Manchester, where she completed her ESRC funded PhD on the European Union’s relations with Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific Group.
