Sociology staff

Lecturers Dr Gemma Edwards and Dr Dharmi Kapadia

Dr Dharmi Kapadia and Dr Gemma Edwards
Dr Dharmi Kapadia and Dr Gemma Edwards

Gemma Edwards gained her PhD in Sociology from Manchester in 2006 and worked for a year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow before becoming a Lecturer in Sociology in September 2007. She is currently the Programme Director for Sociology, and oversee our new Professional Development course for undergraduates (ProD).

Gemma's research specialism is collective actions orientated towards social change, such as those that take place within social movements and protest events, but also in our everyday lives outside of them. She is a member of the Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis, and the Morgan Centre for the Study of Everyday Lives. She is also an editor of the journal Social Movement Studies, and sits on the editorial advisory board of Manchester University Press.

Dharmi Kapadia joined the Sociology Department as a Q-Step Lecturer in March 2017. She is Director of the Cathie Marsh Institute Short Courses, member of the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE), and a UK Data Service Data Impact Fellow. Her main areas of research are ethnic inequalities in health and access to health services. She obtained her PhD in Social Statistics in 2015 from the University of Manchester as part of an ESRC 1 + 3 (MSc and PhD) studentship; this was an investigation of the role of social networks in women's usage of mental health services in the UK, and how this varied by ethnic group. She has also undertaken work looking at ethnic inequalities in the labour market, and the role of social networks in poverty for different ethnic groups. She was a member of the editorial board for the ;CoDE Dynamics of Diversity Census Briefings and co-author of two briefings on ethnic inequalities in unemployment. She was also a Principal Investigator on a project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), exploring the links between social networks, poverty and ethnicity.

Prior to completing her MSc and PhD, Dharmi was a Research Assistant in the Institute of Health Sciences at The University of Manchester working on a large mixed-methods study investigating the role of social networks in chronic illness management. She has also worked in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at this University on two studies: a multi-site randomised controlled trial testing the effectiveness of speech and language therapy communication for preschool children with autism, and on a study evaluating multi-dimensional foster care for looked after adolescents.