Research Team
Our research team is made up of urban studies scholars, political scientists, and political economists and is lead by:
Dr Juanita Elias is the Principal Investigator on this project and Reader in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick. Dr Elias is an editor of the Rowman and Littlefield International book series Global Political Economies of Gender and Sexuality (with Nicola Smith and Adrienne Roberts), and serves on the editorial advisory board of the Review of International Studies. She is a Commissioner on the Political Studies Association of the UK Research Commission on the Crisis of Care in Austerity Britain. Dr Elias has published her work in journals such as International Political Sociology, Economy and Society, Third World Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, International Feminist Journal of Politics and The Pacific Review. She is the author of Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Firm and Gendered Employment in a Globalising World (2004), co-editor (with Samanthi J Gunawardana) of the book The Global Political Economy of The Household in Asia (2013) and co-author of the textbook International Relations: The Basics (2007). A co-edited book (with Lena Rethel) entitled The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia has recently been published by Cambridge University Press.
Dr Chusnul Mar'iyah is a partner on this project. Dr Mar'iyah is also Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Universitas Indonesia (UI) and a founding member and President Director of the Centre for Elections and Political Parties at UI. Since completing her PhD on the subject of ‘Urban Political Conflicts’ at the University of Sydney, much of her research and teaching has been focused on urban politics. Another dominant theme in her work has been the politics of gender across all spatial scales but especially gender politics at the urban level. Her feminist scholarship feeds into her civil roles firstly as a member of Pimpinan Pusat A’isyiyah (the Women’s Wing of Muhammadiyah, Indonesian National Organisation) and secondly as a founding member of the Indonesian Women Coalition for Justice and Democracy, and of Perempuan PeKa (Women for Peace and Justice). Dr Mar'iyah has also held research posts at Victoria University, Melbourne, and acted as Chair of the Institute for Democracy Defense and Strategic Studies (IDDSS) in Jakarta. Her published articles span themes such as women’s role in development, urban politics, elections, conflict resolution, human rights, and democracy in the Muslim world.
Dr Lena Rethel is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Currently, she is based at Princeton University, USA, where she holds a 2016-17 Fung Global Fellowship in the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). Dr Rethel’s research focuses on the interrelationship between finance and development and the emergence of alternative economies/globalisations. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters. Her books are: The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016, co-edited with Juanita Elias), Global Governance in Crisis (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Andre Broome and Liam Clegg) and The Problem with Banks (Zed Books, 2012, co-authored with Timothy J. Sinclair). Dr Rethel has just begun a new research project that will look into how various Islamic economies – finance, halal products and tourism to name a few – are governed and how this compares to traditional arrangements of global economic governance.
Dr Reni Suwarso is a partner on this project and has worked as a lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Universitas Indonesia (UI) since 1992. Now she serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Political Parties Elections (FISIP-UI) and as the Chair of the working group "Master Plan for the Acceleration of Social and Political Development: 1998-2023". Dr Suwarso has published policy-relevant academic work in relation to electoral systems, political parties, policy-making, and the implementation of public policies.
Dr Lisa Tilley is Research Fellow on this project. She is also co-convener of the Raced Markets collaborative research project with QMUL and Associate Editor of the Global Social Theory pedagogical resource. Her wider research explores material approaches to ‘the colonial question’, as well as regimes of racial and gendered difference in relation to processes of accumulation and dispossession in economies of extraction. She has published work in relation to debates within political economy, political ontology, post/decolonial thought, and decolonial methodology.