Professor Peter Hopkins

My interests centre upon issues of social inequality and justice with most of my research focusing upon the intersections of youth, migration and asylum, race and religion, and gender. I am currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (Sept 2023 – Sept 2026).

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2024, I was also presented with the Back Award from the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers for sustained and outstanding contributions to policy development through research in the same year. In 2018, I was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and in 2012 I received the President’s Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In 2011, I received the Gill Memorial Award of the Royal Geographical Society (for contributions to geographies of religion, youth and race). I have held visiting positions at Deakin, RMIT, Monash, Western Sydney and the NUS and was a Distinguished International Professor at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (2020-21). I currently serve on the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Publications Committee.

My current work focuses upon three interconnected areas of inquiry:

Islamophobia – a key focus of my ongoing research is upon the ways in which Islamophobia operates within society to exclude and marginalise Muslims and others mistaken for being Muslim. I am eager to promote better understanding of Islamophobia and to explore the ways in which it reveals itself in distinctive ways in different places. In collaboration with John Clayton (Northumbria) and TellMAMA, I recently produced a report about anti-Muslim hatred in the North East of England.

Refugee experiences – I have recently led two projects about the experiences of refugees, one funded by HERA Public Spaces call focusing on refugee youth and public space, and a second funded by ESRC about refugees and Covid-19. I have collaborated on short pieces about experiences of seeking asylum during a global pandemic and women refugees’ experiences of lockdown and produced a short report about researching refugee youth with the RGS-IBG.

Intersectionality – sensitivity to the complex intersections of multiple forms of discrimination (rather than only looking at single forms of oppression) has been a key focus of much of my research. I have reviewed work about intersectionality in social geography and worked with Stacy Bias to produce an animated video to address the question, what is intersectionality? I have served as a member of the Athena Swan Intersectionality Subgroup of Advance HE.