Dr Nafhesa Ali

Assistant Professor

School: Humanities and Social Sciences

Nafhesa is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Northumbria University and an interdisciplinary Sociologist with expertise in migration and the everyday lives of racialised and minority communities. Nafhesa actively works to promote inclusive research methods and participatory research that aims to decolonize methodological approaches and pedagogy through creative methodologies.

She is a Co-Investigator for the ‘Towards Inclusive Environmental Sustainability (TIES)’ Leverhulme-funded project and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Manchester. Prior to this, Nafhesa was a PDRA on the AHRC Storying Relationships project at the University of Sheffield.

Nafhesa completed her PhD in 2015 and her monograph based on her PhD research, titled Older South Asian Women’s Experiences of Ageing in the UK: Intersectional Feminist Perspectives is out now and has been published with Palgrave Macmillan (2024).

Nafhesa’s publications include a co-authored book, Storying Relationships (2021) and is co-editor for A Match Made in Heaven: British Muslim Women Write about Love and Desire (2020). Nafhesa has journal publications in Sexualities, Ethnicities, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Cultural Geographies.

Nafhesa is a UNESCO Policy Advisor and member of the British Academy Net Zero Reference group.

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Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Exploring loneliness in later life: a reply to ‘Perceptions of older South Asian and Chinese people on social activities to address loneliness’ by Zeibeda Sattar et al, Ali, N. 9 Mar 2026, In: Global Discourse
Neither Worse nor Better: Engagement in Pro-Environmental Behaviors by UK-Born and Global South Immigrant Residents of Manchester UK, Katz-Gerro, T., MacGregor, S., Ali, N., Ahmed, Z. 2 Jan 2026, In: Society and Natural Resources
Beyond the tick-box: meaningful inclusion of racialised communities in UK net zero policy, Ahmed, Z., Ali, N., Ansari, S., Katz-Gerro, T., MacGregor, S., Tobin, P. 2025
Beyond the tick-box: meaningful inclusion of racialized communities in UK net zero policy, Ahmed, Z., Ali, N., Ansari, S., Katz-Gerro, T., MacGregor, S., Tobin, P. 7 May 2025
“When You Think about Climate Change, It Is a Social Justice Issue”: Between the Rock of Stability and the Hard Place of Politicization for Muslim Climate Actors, Tobin, P., Ali, N., MacGregor, S., Ahmed, Z. 7 Aug 2025, Stability and Politicization in Climate Governance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Holding up a mirror: researching symmetrically to explore exclusion, othering and whiteness in local environmental governance, MacGregor, S., Ali, N., Katz-Gerro, T., Walker, C., Ahmed, Z. 3 May 2024, In: Local Environment
Lost voices of Partition: Carrying gender, nation and femininity across the life course, Ali, N. 22 Jul 2024, Later Life, Sex and Intimacy in the Majority World, Bristol, UK, Policy Press
Older South Asian Migrant Women’s Experiences of Ageing in the UK: Intersectional Feminist Perspectives, Ali, N. 14 Mar 2024
“The religions are engaging: tick, well done”: the invisibilization and instrumentalization of Muslim climate intermediaries, Tobin, P., Ali, N., Macgregor, S., Ahmad, Z. 3 Sep 2023, In: Policy Studies