Stephanie Nowack

Dr Stephanie Nowack is a South African Postdoctoral Researcher for the project “Developing a culturally sensitive research approach to higher education aspirations: exploring the hopes and aspirations of British sixth form students of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Heritage.” Funded by Oxford University Press’s John Fell Fund, this participatory project employs creative methods such as the River of Life, and the development of an innovative, cross-cultural hope scale. This research will lay the foundation for a larger study examining hope and aspirations towards higher education among youth in contexts of political and environmental precarity in South Africa and Pakistan.

Stephanie has a decade’s experience leading large-scale, multi-stakeholder research projects in Global South contexts. Her research interests are underpinned by a social – & epistemic justice lens and related to: contextually-grounded, decolonial understandings of playful learning, teacher professional development, and gender – & disability inclusive education. As a LEGO Foundation and Cambridge Trust Scholar, Stephanie holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge (Faculty of Education), within the PEDAL and REAL Centres, focusing on how play can find expressions across neurodivergent and geo-political dimensions. Her doctoral research explored a South African pedagogy of play for autistic learners.

Stephanie is a convenor for the Crisis, Education, and Epistemic Justice (CEEJ) Network and an Organiser for the Cambridge Network for Disability and Education Research (CaNDER). She is a 2019 Harvard Graduate School of Education Project Zero Classroom Fellow and an Advisory Council Member of the Winford Centre for Children and Women in Nigeria.