The Stephen Lawrence Research Centre team

Dr Lisa Amanda Palmer is the Interim Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester. She was the former Course Director for the Black Studies undergraduate programme and Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University.

Lisa is a qualified librarian and previously worked for Birmingham Libraries and Archive Services for many years. She has a keen interest in working with local archive collections, specifically, the Vanley Burke Archive held at the Library of Birmingham.

Her research focuses on Black feminism, Black cultural politics and the intersection of race, racism, gender and sexuality.  Her writing covers a broad spectrum of fields including the gendered politics of lovers’ rock music, the production of local community archives and the misogynoir faced by Black women in British public life. She is the co-author of the book Blackness in Britain (2016) and is currently writing her book on Black women in the UK’s lover’s rock reggae scene.

Sherilyn Pereira has had a long-standing career in Communications, Marketing and Public Relations (PR). Her early career in international fashion PR set the pace for an exciting career in New York where she worked as PR to the newly divorced Ivana Trump and a number of high-profile clients. She also held PR positions at the Metropolitan Opera and Cambridge University’s US Development Office - her entry point into the Higher Education sector.

Sherilyn was a member of DMU’s Communications Team before joining the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre in January 2019, with a focus on developing the public face and professional profile of the centre, which she now manages through delivery of an exciting public engagement programme.  She is also co-chair of DMU’s BAME Network.

Sherilyn juggles her role while studying for an MSc in Advertising and Public Relations Management. Her work is enhanced by her passion for race, identity and social justice issues that are debated on a nightly basis with her large ‘team’ at home.

Dr Fatima Rajina’s research is focussed on the relations between Bangladeshi and Somalian communities in Tower Hamlets in the East End of London. 

She will be looking at how the Bangladeshi community constructs notions of blackness and how this construction unravels vis-a-vis the Somali community.

Dr Rajina says: “I am fascinated by the East End of London and I want to see what the interactions are between communities as they have moved around the world.”

After completing an MA in Islamic Societies and Cultures, Dr Rajina went on to do a PhD at SOAS, University of London. She has also worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, looking at police and counter-terrorism. Dr Rajina was also a Teaching Fellow at SOAS, Research Fellow at UCL and worked as a Lecturer in Sociology at Kingston University.

Dr Rajina has a passion for languages and is fluent in German, Spanish and Bengali and can read and write in classical Arabic.

Dr Yusef Bakkali grew up in Brixton, South London, and from an early age became aware of injustice and inequality operating in society.

His key research focuses around the lives of young people involved in ‘Road Life’ - a contemporary street culture of which elements have recently been the subject of popular media representations in shows like Top Boy (Channel 4/Netflix) and films like Blue Story (BBC Films/Paramount Pictures).  

Yusef says: “It is important to me to be working with people who have a lot of faith in what we are trying to do. We have to respect the legacy of the Lawrence family and our research has to have an activist dimension to it. Activism is about taking a stance. We do not necessarily want to be part of the current research canon. Our research needs to challenge and it needs to take risks.”

Yusef’s areas of expertise are youth, social exclusion, race, crime, music, youth cultures, road life, austerity, decoloniality and masculinities. He holds a PhD in Sociology, an MSc in Social Research Methods and a BA in Politics and Society.

Dr Amina Easat-Daas earned her PhD at Aston University, Birmingham, UK and studied Muslim women’s political participation in France and Belgium. She is an Early Career Academic Fellow in the department of People, Politics and Place at De Montfort University, Leicester. Before joining De Montfort University Amina worked in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds within the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies on the EU funded Counter-Islamophobia Kit project.

Her research interests include the study of Muslim political participation, Muslim women, Muslim youth, Islamophobia and creatively countering-Islamophobia in Europe, gendered dimensions of Islamophobia, and ‘European-Islam’. In her capacity as an emerging Islamophobia studies specialist, she has been invited and has presented her research findings to the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, the Carter Center (USA), and the OSCE-ODIHR among others and has appeared on national and international media on numerous occasions to discuss Muslim current affairs.

Her forthcoming publications include her monograph EASAT-DAAS, A., 2020. Muslim Women’s Political Participation in France and Belgium. (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke)

Dr Christopher Roy Zembe is a Lecturer in History at De Montfort University. His research interests are the history of migration, colonial and post-colonial legacies, Black British History and the African diaspora. His published work consists of: a book entitled Zimbabwean Communities in Britain Imperial and Post-Colonial Identities and Legacies ; a Chapter entitled Quest for a Cohesive Diaspora African Community: Reliving Historic Experiences by Black Zimbabweans in Britain in a book on ‘New Perspectives on Black British History’; and an article in the Journal of Migration History entitled Migrating with Colonial and Post-Colonial Memories: Dynamics of Racial Interactions within Zimbabwe's Minority Communities in Britain.

Chris has also been involved in organising ‘History Matters’ Conference aimed at exploring why there are few history students of African or Caribbean heritage in British education institutions.

His Twitter handle is @czed1970

Camille London-Miyo was awarded a DMU Research Student Scholarship within the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at DMU in October 2020. Her research will focus on black educators who are navigating the dynamics of racism in Leicester Schools. For the past 30 years, Camille has been a teacher and a middle and senior leader in inner city schools. She is also an active trade unionist and became the first black president in the history of Leicester teachers’ unions in 2018. 

Camille is a co-founder of the Black Educators Alliance, a national group of black educators who seek to challenge the institutional racism that exists in education and a co-founder of Leicester Black Educators Network. Additionally, Camille is a community activist who helps to building parent/ community networks to give support to parents of Black children while challenging the narrative of the “underachievement of Black pupils in UK schools.  

Camille is also a co-founder of the Phoenix Agenda Supplementary School also based in Leicester. Her understanding of the complexity and importance of involving students, parents and communities in order to achieve genuine and sustained progress in education at all levels has been the foundation of her work to date, by establishing and working with teacher networks and professional development programmes across the UK.

Camille’s research interests include: black teachers in education - recruitment, retention and progression; strategies to decolonise the UK curriculum; radical pedagogies that challenge empirical ideas about teaching and learning; developing a global “English “Literature Curriculum as part of a holistic anti-racist strategy in schools.  

She has written a chapter entitled: Education, race and the decolonisation of the curriculum in Beyond the Blockade - Education in Cuba (2019) and is presently co editing The History of Black teachers in the NEU as part of the commemoration of 30years of Black teachers self-organising in the Legacy NUT and the NEU - to be published in 2021.

She can be found at Twitter @camillelm7

Mutsa Mhende is a PhD researcher at DMU. Her collaborative doctoral award: Textures of Blackness in the Midlands: Excavating Regional Archives of Black Culture and Politics, is in partnership with the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre and Black Arts organisation, Serendipity. This interdisciplinary and community-based archival project aims to problematise the colonial archive, while reimagining sites of memory which centre the living knowledge production of Black people in this region.

Mutsa is a proud Zimbabwean, who you can often find explaining the deep temporal complexities in traditional African cultures, which allow the past, present, and future to collapse into one spacetime; where we may all become connected across the African diaspora through memory, storytelling, and virtuality. This understanding gives her work, at its core, radical liberatory aims.

Holding a BA(Hons) in Sociology & Politics and an MA in Sociology, Mutsa’s other research projects have been: "The impact of Media representations of Black women’s sexuality" and "Writing in the dirt with a twig: Exploring the personal archives and memory-making of Black women in Britain". Her other research interests include: Black British identity, Black women’s storytelling, African Traditional Religions, and Healing Justice.

Nkiruka Emodi is a PhD researcher at The Stephen Lawrence Research Centre. Her research aims to assess post-Covid-19 spatial inequalities, housing needs; concepts of ‘race’ and wellbeing of people with sickle cell and thalassaemia and their families; and to generate public health and housing policy insights that can be put directly into practice to improve health and wellbeing across the life course. Her supervisor(s) include Dr Natalie Darko (Stephen Lawrence Research Centre), Dr Maria Berghs and Professor Jo Richardson.

Nkiruka is a biomedical scientist working in an NHS hospital laboratory. She has previously worked at the Kings' College Hospital, Red Cell Centre (protein laboratory), a national reference centre for clinical and laboratory services for patients with a range of red cell disorders such as sickle Cell disease, thalassaemias etc. She holds a Master's in Haematology from the University of Westminster and Master's of Public Health from the University of Hertfordshire.

Her research interests focus on the disparities (including race and ethnicity) in the perception and management of any disorder. She is a member of the Sickle Cell Society (SCS) and volunteers for the Sickle Cell Society’s blood donation project ‘Give Blood, Spread Love, England’, a project which encourage and inspire black and mixed-race communities to donate blood.

Alethia Antonia is a freelance choreographer, performer, teacher and researcher. She trained at London Contemporary Dance School, Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance and Northern School of Contemporary Dance. During her undergraduate study, she was a Peggy Hawkins scholar and recipient of the Principal's Award (LCDS) and was awarded the Overall Achievement Award in Professional Practice on completion of her postgraduate studies (NSCD).

Alethia is currently a 1st year PhD researcher (part-time) at De Monfort University, with a Midlands4Cities studentship award. Her doctoral research is investigating the notion of self-authorship feminine blackness to develop decolonised practice methodologies in British contemporary dance. Looking specifically at performance, choreographic and pedagogical practice. Other research interests included trauma, mental health and accessibility, the fluidity of performance modalities, and the relationship between pedagogy and industry.

As a performer, she has worked internationally and danced for companies such as Russell Maliphant Dance Company, Scottish Dance Theatre, James Cousins Company, James Wilton Dance, VOXED – Wayne Parsons, Tribe//, Matsena Productions, and Extended Play.

Her choreographic work has been supported by and performed at venues such as The Place, Dance4, Yorkshire Dance, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds Dance Partnership, York Theatre Royal, Fashion Space Gallery, and DanceEast. She is currently a Work Place Artist at The Place.

As a teacher, she has taught nationally and abroad for institutions such as Scottish Dance Theatre, Phoenix Dance Theatre, Trinity Laban, The Place, London Contemporary Dance School, CAPA College, Dance4, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Kingston University, and Accademia Balletto Roma.