Professor Peter Hopkins

Amongst a number of areas of social inequality and justice, a key focus of much of my research is anti-racism and Islamophobia alongside the experiences of refugee and migrant communities. I am currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (Sept 2023 – Sept 2026) on a project on everyday Islamophobia.

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.

Some of my key areas of research include:

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 a publication about the response of the third sector to supporting asylum seekers and have 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? This video has been received over 765,000 views on YouTube (you can subscribe to my YouTube account to see this and other videos).