Isabelle Higgins (she/her)

Isabelle is committed to doing interdisciplinary research which draws upon a range of theoretical schools to explore the complex and multifaceted ways in which structural relations of power are reproduced through everyday digital technology use. This includes drawing on research produced by scholars working in the fields of anthropology, digital sociology, race critical code studies, the sociology of ‘race’ and racism, critical race theory, decolonial theory and the sociology of reproduction. 

Isabelle is particularly interested in situating her research in a wider social context of contestation, paying attention to the overlap of reproductive, racial and digital injustice in a transatlantic context. Isabelle seeks to explore the historic contingencies implicated in her research field, with a particular focus on tracing the effects of chattel enslavement and settler colonialism on digital technology design and use in the present. In 2022 she held a British Research Council Fellowship at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress and was also a Fellow at the New School’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, to further this work. 

Isabelle also explores the nature of ethical and reflexively situated digital research and explorative mixed methods approaches. She has held a Methods Fellowship for Cambridge Digital Humanities and in the first course taught by the University of Cambridge’s Social Sciences Research Methods Programme on 'Decoloniality in Research Methods. Isabelle draws on this theoretical understanding in her third strand of research: conducting auto-ethnographic work to explore intersectional inequalities she encounters in institutional settings as a mixed-race, white-passing, White British and Afro Caribbean woman. 

Isabelle is passionate about using the tools that social science research offers to contribute to social justice movements. Her research consistently reminds her that academics are connected to the social fields and phenomena that they research. Her commitment to challenging structural inequality takes many forms, though she is particularly committed to structural anti-racism work. In 2019 she successfully relaunched the Race Research Cluster in the Department of Sociology and ran a weekly reading group on Race and Digital Technology based on a syllabus created by the Centre for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU. In 2021, Isabelle worked as a researcher on the Black British Voices Project – the largest survey of Black British experience in UK history. In 2022 she worked to co-convene the conference 'The Post Windrush Generation: Black British Voices of Resistance', a pathbreaking event which brought together a group of leading academics, artists and commentators to explore the history and present-day reality of race relations in the UK. In 2023, Isabelle presented at the ‘Black Awarding Gap and Decolonisation Forum’ at the University of Cambridge. Here, she reflected autoethnographically on her experiences in the University as a mixed-race, white-passing, White British and Afro-Caribbean woman. She is now working to transform this material into a book for a critical series in Inclusion, Practice and Impact in Higher Education.