Dr Dimitra Kotouza

Research Fellow - Leverhulme Trust Project

Moray House School of Education and Sport, IECS
University of Edinburgh

Email: d.kotouza@ed.ac.uk

Street: Moray House School of Education and Sport
City: University of Edinburgh (Holyrood Campus)
Post code: EH8 8AQ

Biography

Background

I am a Research Fellow in the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Biology, Data Science, and the Making of Precision Education’, working with Ben Williamson, Martyn Pickersgill and Jessica Pykett. We will explore how genetic, neural and biometric data are becoming new sources of knowledge and authority for educational practice, affecting social institutions and everyday lives.

In 2020–21, I was lead researcher in the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Mapping and Diagnosing Mental Health in/and the UK University Sector’, with Leon Rocha, Philip Garnett and Felicity Callard. The project mapped policies, markets and socio-technical networks that promote digital, data-driven and algorithmic ‘nudge’ approaches to mental health in UK higher education. See our article in Critical Social Policy.

Prior to this, I published Surplus Citizens (Pluto, 2019), a book on how political subjectivities, knowledges, and forms of social oppression and resistance were shaped under conditions of a rapid economic restructuring in Greece (2010–2016). I also wrote about the violently discriminatory management of HIV in that context, and its relationship to concurrent epidemiological research (chapter in Biopolitical Governance: Race, Gender and Economy, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

My current interests are in how forms of power are enacted and structural inequalities are reproduced or contested through the nexus between scientific knowledge production, new technologies and policies of social reproduction (education, healthcare, work).