The British Sociological Association

About the Convenors

• Aina Tarabini is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and, since December 2025, Director of the research centre GEPS – Globalisation, Education and Social Policy. Her research examines social inequalities in education, with particular attention to secondary schooling and to the mechanisms through which education systems contribute to both the reproduction and transformation of inequality. Particularly, her work focuses on processes of educational (dis)engagement, early school leaving, and young people’s educational trajectories, experiences and identities, as well as on curriculum, pedagogy and teachers’ practices from a critical sociological perspective. Grounded in a social justice approach, her research foregrounds the relational, affective and care dimensions of schooling and learning. Overall, she seeks to connect the subjective, institutional and systemic dimensions of inequality through a qualitative-driven approach. She is currently the principal investigator of the competitive research projects LEARNER and Acompanya’m. Some of her books include Educational Transitions and Social Justice (2022), The Conditions for School Success (2019), and Educational Choices, Transitions and Aspirations in Europe (2018).
  
  
• Ruby Brooks is a Lecturer in Early Childhood & Education at Manchester Metropolitan University. Ruby’s PhD explored the positioning of gossip as an emancipatory force within the female dominated early years workforce and the societal devaluation of femininity as a concept. Ruby’s research interests include gender, early childhood, power, feminism and forest school.
  
  
• Franziska Lessky is an Assistant Professor at the University of Innsbruck and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) Vienna. As a sociologist of education and a qualitative as well as quantitative researcher, Franziska is interested in issues of student equity in higher education, educational transitions, graduate employability and careers in academia. She has received several grants and awards for her research, such as the Stephan-Koren-Prize for excellent dissertations, and the Dr. Maria-Schaumayer Award. She serves as a co-convenor of the German-speaking Society for Higher Education Research (Gesellschaft für Hochschulforschung - GfHf) and of two networks for early career scholars in the fields of education (ÖFEB Emerging Researchers) and higher education studies (HoFoNa).
  
  
• Flora Petrik is currently studying for a PhD in Education, at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She works as Research Associate and Lecturer at the Department of Foundations of Education at the Institute for Educational Science and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research project explores the experiences of first generation students in Austrian and German Higher Education. She studied Educational Science, German Studies and Comparative Literature in Vienna (Austria) and Jyväskylä (Finland) and is part of the research training group "Doing Transitions", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her research interests include education and social inequalities; qualitative methods; social class and Bourdieu's theory of practice.
  
  
• Berenice Scandone is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Polytechnic University of Milan. Her research is concerned with how social inequalities are (re)produced or transformed in and through education, focusing on the interplay of socio-economic, ethnic and gender background in constructing learners’ experiences and identities. Berenice’s current work explores the relation between school socio-economic and ethnic segregation and students’ educational outcomes and pathways. Prior to this, she was Postdoc Fellow at the University of Urbino, working on the construction of learning outcomes among young people in the EU, and Research Director at the National Centre for Social Research (UK), leading applied research and programme evaluations in the field of education and youth inequalities. She is the author of the recently published book ‘British-Bangladeshi Women in Higher Education: Aspirations, Inequities, and Identities’.
  
  
• Denisse Sepúlveda is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Economics and Social Policy (CEAS), Universidad Mayor. Also is an associate researcher in the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) and Millennium Nucleus for Research on Anti-Racist Chilean Education. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester, where her doctoral research examined the consequences of social mobility among Indigenous people and how they negotiate their identities across class and ethnicity. She is part of the editorial board of the journal Sociological Research Online. She is an associate researcher on the project “Successful Trajectories of Social Mobility in Contemporary Chile: Individual, Territorial and Structural Dynamics in Tackling Wealth Inequality”, funded by the Julius Baer Foundation. Associate researcher on the MiniCOES project “Expectations and Political Attitudes: Trajectories of Young People from Working-Class Backgrounds in Higher Education, from a Gender and Territorial Perspective.” She was a founding member of the Feminist Social Sciences Network. She also coordinates the projects Narrativas Visuales and Perceptions of Contemporary Indigenous Identities.   
  
  
• Rachel Stenhouse is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research areas are mathematics education and social justice. Rachel has examined how teachers’ social and cultural capital might advantage their students when applying to elite universities.
  
  
• Amy E. Stich is an Associate Professor of Higher Education at the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia and an affiliate faculty member with the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies program at the University of Georgia. As a sociologist of education and qualitative researcher, Stich is interested in issues of inequality of educational access, opportunity, and outcome relative to social class and race. Her research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and the National Science Foundation. She is the author of more than 30 publications, including Access to Inequality: Reconsidering Class, Knowledge, and Capital in Higher Education (Lexington Books) and co-editor of The Working Classes and Higher Education: Inequality of Access, Opportunity, and Outcome (Routledge). At the McBee Institute, Stich teaches graduate-level, introductory and advanced courses in qualitative research and social theory.