About
Senior Lecturer/Derby Research Fellow for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Theme of 'Slavery & Unfree Labour', and Co-Lead for Decolonial Research with the Centre for Studying International Slavery (CSIS), developing anticolonial research approaches to research.
Leona's expertise is in social policy areas of 'risk', 'harm', 'prevention' and 'repair'. She has a longstanding professional background in equality and human rights, and was the global lead for Vulnerable Populations research at the Finance Against Slavery & Trafficking (FAST) initiative, United Nations University Centre for Policy Research in New York, 2021-2024.
She has led numerous interdisciplinary, collaborative research projects with academic, civil society and community partners centring lived experience to explore the impacts of a range of national and international social policy issues including safeguarding in research (UK Collaborative for Development Research); counter terrorism/children; children/race hate crime; COVID-19 lockdown policy; 'modern slavery' (UN University Centre for Policy Research) and reparatory justice (health inequalities/legacies of racial slavery).
She is co-founder of Barriers to Black Academia, New Visions of Black Health (NewViBH), External Evaluation Expert for EU Creative Europe decolonial heritage project Contested Desires Constructive Dialogues and part of UNESCO Global Dialogues for Reparatory Justice.
Leona teaches and supervises students across the Faculty and is based in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology from 2026/27.