Dr Josephine Biglin
School of Health & Society
Current positions
Lecturer in Psychology
Biography
I am a critical sociological/community psychologist and joined Salford 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 Salford 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