Dr Dita N Love

Dr Dita N. Love is an interdisciplinary social scientist and education researcher researching intersections across youth education, creative arts and digital humanities, and abolitionist social justice. As Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College, her research focuses on youth-led creative community-university partnerships to remodel widening participation in higher education. She is also teaching a new session on Poetic Inquiry for masters’ students at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and for 2023 she holds a Methods Fellowship from the Cambridge Digital Humanities, focused on trauma-sensitive creative and critical digital methods. Her recent ESRC-funded project examined young people’s spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development, educational justice, and Spoken Word in partnership with Manchester’s combined arts charity and spoken word collective, Young Identity, at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge where she completed her doctorate (Gates Cambridge Scholarship).  

Her doctoral research introduced a new arts-based research programme with marginalised young men in prison, poets, educators and Hip Hop artists as alternative to their reported histories of exclusion and trauma. Previously, she worked for the participatory Drug Policy Voices project at the Department of Sociology, MMU, and was selected as emerging European poet for Versopolis. Her research interests are partly informed by her creative practice, and experiences as ethnically Aromanian (i.e. Vlach) first-generation student. Her work has been published by the Oxford Review of Education, Australian Art Education, Mantis (Stanford University's journal of Poetry, Criticism & Translation), Palgrave, and Routledge.