ABOUT ME

I am Deputy Director of the Democratic Innovations Research Unit at Goethe University Frankfurt, as well as Co-Investigator and Work Package Leader on the Horizon-funded INSPIRE project.

My research combines democratic theory, public administration theory and empirical social science to understand a range of topics relating to democratic governance, including: developing a systemic conception of democracy; evaluating participatory governance projects; understanding the opportunities for democratic innovation represented by new digital technologies; and analysing political actors’ attitudes to democracy.

I previously taught social policy at the London School of Economics and Democratic Innovations at the University of Westminster. I have worked on research projects for LSE, Oxford University, University of Manchester, University of Birmingham and University of Westminster. In 2015, I was a Visiting Democracy Fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Innovation and Governance and, in 2022, I was a visiting researcher at CEVIPOL, Université Libre de Bruxelles.

I hold a PhD and an MSc from the London School of Economics, where my research focused on participatory innovations in the social policy process. My PhD Thesis, Democratising Bureaucracy, received the LSE’s Richard Titmuss Prize for Outstanding Scholarship. I also have a BA in Philosophy and Literature and MA in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex.

In 2018, I was awarded the Bleddyn Davies Prize for best Early Career Paper from the journal Policy and Politics for my article Beyond Radicalism and Resignation: The Competing Logics for Public Participation in Policy Decisions. In 2021 I was awarded a Johanna Quandt Young Academy Sabbatical Fellowship for outstanding research in comparative politics.