Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship
About the Fellowship: Neil Davidson was widely recognised as one of the most profoundly original Marxist thinkers of his generation as well as one of the most significant historians of Scotland, of the nation-state more generally and of the uneven processes of capitalist development. Thanks to the generosity of Neil's partner, Cathy Watkins, the Neil Davidson Writing Fellowships have been established in recognition of Neil's enduring work as historian, theorist, teacher and activist. The Fellowships are intended to support early career researchers whose work is informed by, and seeks to extend, progressive and radical traditions of critical investigation broadly conceived, whether through the development of new historical or theoretical scholarship or through the pursuit of original empirical research.
The Fellowship provides six months full-time stipendiary support, as well as an academic mentor, with the intention of allowing the recipient the time and space to publish material deriving from their doctoral thesis and to make the conclusions of their work available to a wider audience, academic and/or non-academic.
Memories and reflections on Neil's life and work can be found here and Neil's Academia.Edu site remains active, allowing access to many of his existing publications and to new material as it becomes available.
Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship 2025
We expect to advertise the next round of the Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship in early 2025.
Informal inquiries can be made to Professor Andy Smith: Andrew.Smith.2@glasgow.ac.uk
Neil Davidson Writing Fellows
Past holders: The first two recipients of the Neil Davidson fellowship - Wilson Sherwin and Ashli Mullen - took up their posts at the end of June 2022.
Wilson Sherwin: Born and raised in New York City, Wilson Sherwin has worked as an electrician, a nanny, a translator, and a documentary film producer. She is currently a sociologist who writes and teaches about social movements, labour, and public policy. Recent academic publications include: "The Radical Feminist Politics of the Welfare Rights Movement" co-authored with Frances Fox Piven, and "Time for Rabble Rousing: Lessons from the historic fight for reduced working hours" in The Green New Deal and the Future of Work.
During the course of her Fellowship Wilson worked on a project at the intersection of labour studies, social movement scholarship and critical theory. In seeking to uncover the forgotten, radical politics of the US based Welfare Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s her work aimsto make central the voices of working class women and people of colour as sophisticated anti-capitalist theorists in their own right, and askes: how do people gain the temerity to demand seemingly impossible things? What curtails people’s sense of possibility, and what expands it?
Ashli Mullen: Ashli Mullen is a sociologist who works on questions of value and racialised capitalism. Her research explores how the links between welfare chauvinism, economic exploitation, and deportability structure the conditions that racialised migrant workers labour under. She is the author of ‘‘Race’, Place and Territorial Stigmatisation: The Construction of Roma Migrants in and through Govanhill, Scotland’ in New Scots: Scotland's immigrant communities since 1945 and ‘From informal to formal economic exploitation’ in Critical Sociology.
She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral research, Racialised Capitalism at the Margins: an ethnography with Roma migrant workers, which is the project that she focussed on during her time as Writing Fellow. She is also working on a second book, co-authored with Satnam Virdee, which is provisionally titled Marxism and Racialised Capitalism, to be published by Polity Press in 2024. Ashli also works as Creative Director of Romano Lav, an anti-racist Roma migrant organisation based in Govanhill.
The second holders of the Neil Davidson writing fellowship were Neil Gray and Panos Theodoropoulos.
Neil Gray: Neil Gray is an urban researcher, writer and long-term housing activist. His current work primarily focuses on urban political economy, urban crisis, and housing and anti-gentrification movements. Amongst his publications in this area are essays in City, Antipode, Progress in Human Geography and Urban Studies, as well as an edited collection - Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle - with Rowan & Littlefield, 2018. He has written widely for non-academic audiences, co-founded Glasgow Games Monitor 2014 and is active within Living Rent tenants’ union.
During the course of the Fellowship Neil has been working on a forthcoming monograph entitled Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in 1970s Italy, which is under contract with Common Notions. The study will offer the first sustained account of the spatialities of operaismo and the revolutionary movements which emerged in 1960s and 1970s Italy. Drawing on urban theory and autonomist Marxist theory and practice, it argues that these pioneering struggles in the arena of social reproduction offer vital lessons for the present moment, not least in their prescient recognition of and response to the growing role played by urban political economy and real estate within contemporary capitalism.
Panos Theodoropoulos: Panos' work is addressed to a key political question: what are the barriers to the organisation of the most precarious and exploited members of society? More specifically, he is interested in understanding the experiences of precarious migrant workers, and he explores how a range of factors - migration status, working conditions, gender and class - intersect in those experiences, as well as the ways in which those involved make sense of, internalise, and navigate the consequences of those experiences.
During the course of the Fellowship Panos has been working on a forthcoming monograph, entitled The Socialisation of Precarity, which is under contract with Polity Press. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in a series of workplaces dominated by insecure, migrant labour, he aims to foreground the voices and lives of migrant workers, and to draw out practical lessons for movements aimed at mobilising against precarity and exploitation. Panos also publishes widely in non-academic settings, including as a contributor to Bella Caledonia and the Hampton Institute, and is a co-founder of Interregnum.live, an autonomous platform dedicated to critical thought and engagement.
In January 2025 we will be joined by our latest Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellow: Mitaja Chakraborty: Mitaja received her doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of Hyderabad, India. Her thesis, titled "What Makes Garment(s) Work?: Gendered Labour and Networks of Struggle in the garment industry of Dhaka, Bangladesh", looked at garment workers’ struggles in the postcolonial globalising economy of Bangladesh. It revolved around the question of political subjectivity that emerges within the factory floors as well as in everyday spaces as central to the framing of demands and conflicts and overlaps between the local and international activist networks. In that context, she looked at the interlinked discourses on development, empowerment and labour rights by the state, brands and owners and local activist networks.
During the period of the fellowship, she plans to work on publications, drawn from her doctoral fieldwork, that extend Social Reproduction Theory framework to look at non-conjugal spaces as sites of social reproduction, care and solidarity. Since Bangladesh and especially the garment industry has been at the centre of labour rights concerns for transnational activist campaigns, she seeks to undertake a materialist analysis of the relations and meaning making processes between the main actors in the field and an international researcher that would contribute to the feminist methodological interventions in the areas of work and labour. In response to the growing focus on the narrativisation of Muslim women workers' lives, her research seeks to re-centre work as a site of meaning making and transformation towards an anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist future.