Armine Ishkanian is a Professor in the Department of Social Policy and the Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme at the International Inequalities Institute. She also co-convenes the Politics of Inequality research programme at the International Inequalities Institute. Armine’s research examines the relationship between civil society, democracy, development, and social transformation. She has examined how civil society organisations and social movements engage in policy processes and transformative politics in a number of countries including Armenia, Egypt, Greece, Russia, Turkey, and the UK.
Armine is currently working on two research projects. First, she is the Principal Investigator of the Activism, Policy, and Transformation (APT) project which examines the question: Under which circumstances and due to what factors do movements’ ideas and actions influence and inform social policy and wider socio-political transformations? The project’s epistemological and ontological approach is based on an international, collaborative and comparative research methodology that foregrounds and brings into dialogue the research and perspectives of scholars and practitioners based in Africa, post-socialist Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America.
The second project, is linked to the AFSEE programme and examines the methodological and epistemological challenges of researching inequalities and considers the ways in which academic practitioner collaborations, as a methodology, contests, transforms, or (re)produces knowledge inequalities. The AcPrac project considers under what circumstances academic – practitioner collaborations can contribute to decolonising research in the area of inequalities studies.
Armine’s research has been published in a wide range of journals including: Critical Social Policy, Democratization, Europe Asia Studies, Journal of Civil Society, Journal of International Development, Journal of Social Policy, Social Politics, Sociological Review, and Voluntas. She is the author of two books: Democracy Building and Civil Society in Armenia (2008) and The Big Society Debate: A New Agenda for Social Welfare? (co-edited with Simon Szreter 2012). In 2016 she received the Best Article Award from the International Society for Third Sector Research for her article “Surreptitious Symbiosis: Engagement Between Activists and NGOs” (published in the Voluntas and co-authored with Marlies Glasius).
Through her research she also engages with a number of foundations and NGOs as a means of disseminating research findings and creating platforms for multi-stakeholder discussions. She is currently a member of the Advisory Committee of the project and has previously had research and knowledge exchange projects funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Heinrich Boell Stiftung, and the Robert Bosch Stiftung. She is a Trustee of a local charity in North London, that works with young people to provide mentoring, counselling, training, and support to reduce violence and save lives.
Armine welcomes enquiries from potential PhD students to work on topics in her areas of interest.