School of Social & Political Sciences

The School is delighted to announce that Wilson Sherwin and Ashli Mullen will be the first two recipients of the Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship and will take up their posts at the end of June 2022. 

Wilson Sherwin is a sociologist who writes and teaches about social movements, labour, and public policy.  In 2019 she received her PhD from the City University of New York. Some of her recent academic publications include: 'The Radical Feminist Politics of the Welfare Rights Movement' co-authored with Frances Fox Piven, and the forthcoming 'Time for Rabble Rousing: Lessons from the historic fight for reduced working hours' in The Green New Deal and the Future of Work, edited by Craig Calhoun and Benjamin Y. Fong,  Columbia University Press.

The project she will focus on during her Fellowship sits at the intersection of labour studies, social movement scholarship and critical theory. In seeking to uncover the forgotten, radical politics of the US based Welfare Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s, she aims to make central the voices of working class women and people of colour as sophisticated anti-capitalist theorists and asks: how do people gain the temerity to demand seemingly impossible things? What curtails people’s sense of possibility, and what expands it?

Ashli Mullen is a sociologist who works on questions of value and racialised capitalism. Her research explores how the links between welfare chauvinism, economic exploitation, and deportability structure the conditions that racialised migrant workers labour under. She is the author of ‘Race’ Place and Territorial Stigmatisation: The Construction of Roma Migrants in and through Govanhill, Scotland’ in New Scots: Scotland's immigrant communities since 1945 and ‘From informal to formal economic exploitation: tricks of capital and the production and circulation of illusory value’, forthcoming in Critical Sociology.  

She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral research, Racialised Capitalism at the Margins: an ethnography with Roma migrant workers, which is the project that she will undertake during her time as a Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellow. She is also working on a second book, co-authored with Professor Satnam Virdee, which is provisionally titled Marxism and Racialised Capitalism (to be published by Polity Press in 2024). Ashli also works as Creative Director of Romano Lav, an anti-racist Roma migrant organisation based in Govanhill, where she continues to work with the communities that her research is indebted to.

Neil Davidson was a unique intellectual, whose work ranged across a variety of fields, from the history of revolution, Scottish history, the far-right, state racism, intellectual history and neoliberalism. He was widely recognised as one of the most profoundly original Marxist thinkers of his generation, as well as one of the most significant historians of Scotland, of the nation-state more generally and of the uneven processes of capitalist development.

Thanks to the generosity of Neil's partner, Cathy Watkins, the Neil Davidson Writing Fellowships have been established in recognition of Neil's enduring work as historian, theorist, teacher and activist. They provide six months full-time stipendiary support, as well as an academic mentor, with the intention of allowing the recipient the time and space to publish material deriving from their doctoral thesis and to make the conclusions of their work available to a wider audience, academic and/or non-academic. 

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First published: 7 May 2022