Leila Dawney is an Associate Professor in Human Geography.  As a cultural geographer and social theorist, she is renowned internationally for her conceptual and empirical work on authority, affect and experience. She has advanced conceptual debates in geographies of affect and non-representational theory in Human Geography. She has instituted international research networks that span Brazil, USA, New Zealand and Ireland. She has led several projects investigating modes of experience in late capitalist life, generating conceptually driven empirical research on commons and postcapitalist spaces, nuclear decommissioning and community, personal debt, and on cultures of militarism in in the UK. Her methodological innovations have had significant impact in mixed-methods approaches and interdisciplinary methodologies.

Her commitment to engaged, values-led participatory research is informed by her fourteen-year position as co-leader of the Authority Research Network, and its publishing imprint ARN Press. As a key thinker on authority, and on participatory practices of creative theory-work in collaboration with publics, activists, creative practitioners and communities, her writing has been influential outside of the academy, most notably in the creative industries and activist organisations.

Her current research addresses nuclear decommissioning and the ruins of nuclear modernity, most recently through fieldwork in a former nuclear town in Lithuania. She has received invitations to speak in Sweden, Netherlands, Brazil, Ireland, Lithuania and the USA. Three of her publications have been translated to Brazilian Portuguese, where she is known for her work on ruination and community authority.