Dina Zoe Belluigi

Dina’s research and practice grapples with the conditions for academic citizenship, participation and development; engaging with questions of authoring/ authority and freedom within and beyond institutional borderlines. Underpinning concerns with the ways in which interpretative frameworks, and socio-cultural dynamics and machinations, have significance for critical consciousness, resistance and social justice.

 

Dina is Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation in Academia at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland), where she is situated in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work (SSESW), and is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. She is a Visiting Professor at CriSHET, Nelson Mandela University (South Africa) and Visiting Professor at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University (India). Prior to that, she was a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University (South Africa) for over a decade; preceded by educational roles in the School of Fine Art at the same institution. She read for her transdisciplinary PhD in Fine Art and Higher Education Studies at Kingston University (London, UK), under the supervision of Prof Emeritus Bernadette Blair and Ann Hulland. From early on in her work, she raised questions about the conditions for creativity and criticality, and the politics and possibilities of representation and of memorialisation in the aftermath of oppression, from arts-based methodologies through to visual studies and creative arts research.

 

She was a founding member of Advancing Critical University Studies Across Africa (with Andre Keet); a founding member of the African Scholars Research Network (AfSRN) in Northern Ireland (with Felicity Kalu and Gift Sotonye-Frank); and serves as an elected member of the Governing Council for the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE, UK), and on the Scholars at Risk Committee Ireland (SAR Ireland). In addition to a range of editorial and advisory roles, she contributes voluntarily to a range of organisations and collectives.