Role
Dr Ana Isabel Nunes is a Lecturer in Social and Political Sciences, specialising in youth civic and political engagement, and art for social change. Ana teaches on a range of modules within the department of Social and Political Sciences.
She is the module leader for Applied Social Research, and Politics of Art, Film, and Literature at undergraduate level and Researching Political Issues at postgraduate level. Ana also contributes to teaching other modules like Young Citizens, Place and Belonging. At the moment, Ana is the course leader for the MSc Public Policy and MSc Politics and Public Policy and she serves as the lead for the Citizenship, Democracy and Transformation research group.
Career overview
Prior to joining NTU in 2020, Ana completed an MA in Communication, Culture, and Information Technologies at ISCTE-IUL (Lisbon, Portugal) with a dissertation entitled "(Des)teatralizando a sociedade através do teatro do oprimido: estudo de caso do grupo de Teatro do Oprimido ValArt". She received her PhD in Politics and International Relations from Nottingham Trent University in 2019, entitled "The Development of a valid and reliable instrument to assess young people's political (dis)engagement in Britain and Portugal: A psychometric approach", funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT).
During her masters degree, Ana taught two undergraduate modules Art and Society I and Art and Society II as part of the Performative Arts courses at Escola Superior de Tecnologias e Artes de Lisboa (ESTAL). After finishing her PhD in 2019, Ana worked as a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham.
Ana supervises dissertation research projects at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Currently, she also supervises the following PhD projects:
- Evaluating different approaches to deliberative democracy in climate change, and how they translate to climate action in UK local authorities (Director of Studies).
- Explaining the changes in British citizens’ political participation during the 2020-2022 COVID-19 crisis through postmaterialist theory (Co-supervisor)
- New Public Governance in practice in an NHS organisation (Collaboratory PhD project, Co-supervisor)
Research areas
Ana's research focuses on youth political participation, examining how young people navigate and influence political spaces in both traditional and non-traditional forms. The interest in this area of study began when she was doing her masters, and started investigating how Theatre of the Oppressed could be a powerful tool to enhance public debate about political and civic issues relevant to marginalised youth groups. In some way, her PhD research follows from this previous work. Taking a mixed methods approach to understand how young people conceptualise and operationalise political engagement, her PhD dissertation further proposed a way to assess youth political engagement which could serve as an instrument to help inform policy and democratic institutions about the ways and levels of youth engagement with politics.
Ana has also recently lead an evaluation project of the initiative Future of Futures, and how this programme contributed to creating a safe space for young people to engage in social and political issues through the arts. This research was commissioned by a cultural organisation in Nottingham. She has also been part of the research team behind a national project on citizenship education and democratic participation commissioned by the Association for Citizenship Studies (ACT) and a member of the Multi-Actor Research and Knowledge Exchange Teams (MARKETs) research group.
She also explores the transformative power of arts and theatre as tools for social change, investigating how creative practices can promote dialogue, raise awareness, and inspire collective action in diverse communities, with a special interest in younger generations.
Ana is also interested in methodological practices and approaches used in youth politics research, advocating for creative, participatory, and often interdisciplinary approaches that challenge conventional boundaries.
External activity
Ana is a trustee of the Political Studies Association (PSA), a UK-based association that promotes the development and education of political studies, and a co-convener for the Young People's Politics specialist group (PSA). She is also a member of the Portuguese Sociological Association.
Ana regularly reviews papers for journals like Journal of Youth Studies, Child and Youth Services, Societies, Alternatives, Politics, Political Studies, Journal of Civil Society, and others.
Publications
Peer reviewed articles
Pontes, A., Henn, M., Griffiths, M.D. (2018). Towards a conceptualization of young people’s political engagement: A qualitative focus group study. Societies 8, 0-17, doi: 10.3390/soc8010017.
Henn, M., Sloam, J., and Nunes, A. (2021). Young cosmopolitans and environmental politics: How postmaterialist values inform and shape youth engagement in environmental politics. Journal of Youth Studies, 1-21. DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2021.1994131
Kushnir, I. and Nunes, A. (2022). Education and the UN developmental goals projects (MDGs and SDGs): definitions, links, operationalisations. Journal of Research in International Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/14752409221088942
Book chapters
Nunes, A., and Henn, M. (2021). Bridging qualitative and quantitative approaches in the study of political participation. In: M. Giugni and M. Grasso, eds., The Oxford handbook of political participation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nunes, A. I., and Love, K (2025). Arts-based and creative activism for youth-led change. In B. Bowman and S. Akram, eds, The Routledge Handbook of Young People and Environmental Activism (forthcoming)
Edited books
Nunes, A.I., Hoff, I., and Howard, F. (eds) Youth Studies: A multidisciplinary approach. Edward Elgar Publishing (forthcoming)
Reports
Nunes, A.I., Love, K., and Henn, M. (2023) Re-creating the future through the arts: evaluating innovative models of engaging young people with social and political issues. Nottingham Contemporary. Unpublished manuscript
Henn, M., Sloam, J., and Nunes, A. I. (2025). Young people and citizenship education: The impact of studying GCSE Citizenship Studies on young people's democratic engagement and participation. United Kingdom, Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT)
The Conversation
The Conversation - 6th of February 2025 - Legislative theatre: how this interactive artform empowers communities to create social change.
Please note: Previous work was published under Ana Isabel Pontes.