Dr Alex Powell
LLB; LLM; PhD; FHEA
Principal Lecturer in Law and Programme Lead for Law; Interim Network Co-Lead, Migration and Asylum Research Network
School of Law and Social Sciences
Role
Alex joined the School of Law at Oxford Brookes University in 2020 as a Teaching Fellow in Law. In February 2022, he took up a new role as a Lecturer in Law. In July 2023, Alex was appointed as a Principal Lecturer in Law and took on Programme Lead responsibilities for several Law programmes including our LLM Programmes; the Final Year Entry Programme and the MC Greece, BCAS and Brickfields partnerships. Alongside his teaching and administrative responsibilities, Alex is the Research Group Convenor for the Critical Legal Perspectives on Law, Society, Gender and Diversity research group and the Interim Network Co-Lead of the Migration and refugees Research Network.
Alex holds a PhD in Law from City, University of London for a thesis entitled Queering Refugee Law: A Study of Sexual Diversity in Asylum Policy and Practice in the United Kingdom. Before beginning his doctoral studies, Alex graduated from Birkbeck, University of London with an LLM with Distinction in Constitutional Politics, Law, and Theory and The University of Reading with a first-class LLB in Law. During his LLM, Alex was also awarded the Gilchrist Postgraduate Prize for 'outstanding achievement across all masters programmes' and the LLM in Constitutional Law prize for 'The top graduate on LLM in Constitutional Politics, Law and Theory.'
During his doctoral studies, Alex also held roles as an Associate Lecturer in Law at Royal Holloway, University of London and a Visiting Lecturer and Graduate Teaching Fellow in Law at City, University of London.
Alex recently submitted his first monograph, entitled Queering UK Refugee Law: Sexual Diversity and Asylum Administration. This will be published as a part Bristol University Press's Law, Society, Policy series.
Teaching and supervision
Courses
Modules taught
Module leader of:
- Theory and Critique of Human Rights (LLM)
- Contemporary Issues in Human Rights (LLM)
Supervision
Alex welcomes PhD Proposals on topics relating to gender, sexuality and law. He is also open to projects that utilise critical and socio-legal methodologies. Alex has particular expertise in the areas of criminal law, human rights law, and international refugee law.
Research
Alex's work draws predominantly on the work of Michel Foucault, as well as queer theorists such as Judith Butler, to analyse the relationship between legal apparatus and cultural discourses. However, Alex is also a trained qualitative interviewer, with expertise in narrative analysis approaches. As such, he seeks to bring together critical scholarship and empirical socio-legal research. His research comprises two main strands: The first deploys queer and post-structuralist methodologies to understand, critique, and evaluate the inter-relations of gender, "sexuality" and state administrative institutions. Alex's research within this strand particularly focuses on how state agencies, such as the Home Office, conceptualise sexual diversity and the forms of violence which can arise when this conceptualisation is not aligned with the self-conceptions of those coming into contact with the said state apparatus. The second strand focuses on how social and political discourses can shift, undermine, and alter the function of legal entities. For example, Alex's 2019 Book Chapter '"The Will of the People": The UK Constitution, (Parliamentary) Sovereignty and Brexit' looked at how the political discourses of public sovereignty emerging from the 2016 EU referendum may work to undermine the centrality of Parliamentary Sovereignty to the UK constitution.
Research impact
Projects
Publications
Professional information
Memberships of professional bodies
Socio-Legal Studies Assocation
Society of Legal Studies
Association of Law Teachers
Conferences
Further details
Alex is currently a Trustee of the Socio-Legal Studies Association