I joined the Department of Social Sciences in September 2007 as Lecturer in Sociology, having previously held a post as Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough University. Before coming to Loughborough in 2003 I was a Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research in Oslo.

I gained my PhD in Sociology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1998, where apart from reading a lot of sociological theory and methods, I specialised in the Sociology of Religion and the Sociology of Gender. I was lucky to be invited by Professor Jon Miller to work with him on a National Science Foundation funded project on the European evangelical missionary movement, and chose to do my doctoral thesis on the Norwegian missionary movement in Norway and Madagascar and issues of gender, race, sexuality and class (published as a book by the Edwin Mellen Press in 2003).

Prior to living and studying in Los Angeles, I spent a year studying Political Science at the University of Santa Barbara, California, as I had received a scholarship to participate in a student exchange programme. While in Santa Barbara I researched my MA thesis on the American radical environmental organisation Earth First! I gained my MA in Administration and Organisation Theory at the University of Bergen in 1992, and for my BA, also from Bergen, I studied comparative politics, administration and organisation theory, and political philosophy.

My main interests are in the sociology of gender (including feminist theory and women’s movements), the sociology of religion, sociology of migration and ethnic relations, citizenship and identities, social movements, and public policy. I welcome PhD proposals in all of these areas.

I am currently one of the lead researchers on the European Commission funded project Gendered citizenship in multicultural Europe: The impact of contemporary women’s movements (see www.femcit.org) which began in February 2007 and will run until January 2011. I am Work Package Leader for the theme “Multicultural citizenship: Intersections between feminism, ethnic identity and religion”, and I lead an international, collaborative team of researchers undertaking comparative studies in the UK, Norway and Spain.

My research within FEMCIT spans from studying relations between ethnic majority and ethnic minority women in women’s movements, the resonance or non-resonance between women’s movement claims-making and public policy, women’s movement activists’ citizenship practice and their views on citizenship, and, finally, Christian and Muslim women’s religious participation and citizenship practices.

Over the past years I have initiated, worked on and led several research projects that have investigated the experiences of ethnic minorities, including Muslim women and men, ethnic minority women’s organisations, and immigrant organisations more generally. In a recent project sponsored by the Research Council of Norway, I studied immigrant organisations in Norway with a view to their involvement in political decision-making processes. The project followed on from my previous research on the national political influence of ethnic minority women’s organisations, which was commissioned jointly by the Norwegian Research Programme on Power and Democracy and the Norwegian Ministry of Children and Family Affairs.

In the field of migration and ethnic relations, I have also studied the views and practices of Muslim women and men in relation to gender, which involved in-depth interviews with Muslims in Norway of Pakistani and Moroccan backgrounds. I also led the evaluation of the Contact Committee for Immigrants and the Authorities in Norway, commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development.