Dr Rhianna Garrett

Research Fellow

School: Geography and Natural Sciences

Dr Rhianna Garrett is a Leverhulme Early Career fellow at Northumbria 2025-2028, on her project entitled (Self)categorisation as Resistance: The Refusal of Mixed Ethnic Categorisation, based in the department of Geography and Environmental Sciences.

This project pioneers an ambitious new direction for mixed ethnic studies within geographies of resistance, transcending traditional approaches to ‘race’ research. Specifically, the project demonstrates how global mixed ethnic populations in Britain, the US, Singapore, Germany, and Bosnia and Herzegovina resist oppressive linguistic, social, and political ethnic categorisation through their own self-identification. Through an innovative mixed methods approach of interviews and photography, she aims to produce a monograph and photography exhibition creatively illustrating how these oppression's are resisted, increasing scholarly and public interests, and construct academic spaces that make mixed ethnic matters, matter.

Her previous research examined how institutional whiteness shapes the career trajectories of doctoral and early career researchers, with additional expertise in the study of whiteness, social justice, and mixed ethnic women's expereinces in higher education. She is currently working on several projects investigating how to change the methods we use to track ethnicity demographic information in a more intersectional way.

Additionally, Rhianna has explored projects related to gamification, including boardgames and role playing games, to increase engagement in Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) activities. She has run several institution-wide interdisciplinary training programmes aimed at creating meaningful collaboration and change within anti-racism work, contributing signitificantly to facilitating vibrant and inclusive workplace environments.

For her voluntary roles, Rhianna is the Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) Association executive board Global Coordinator, where she connects all countries outside of the US concerned with multiethnic matters, and is currently the social media coordinator for the charity, People in Harmony.

Rhianna is a Chinese mixed ethnic scholar open to discussing mixed ethnic studies with anyone interested in the topic.