I joined Northumbria in September 2017 as a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020. My academic background is interdisciplinary. I hold a BA in Politics, MA in Politics (IR/IPE) and PhD in Sociology. My research and teaching interests integrate approaches from across these disciplines to better understand a wide range of contemporary criminological issues.

Previous projects have focused on such themes as the methods and motivations of suppliers and consumers of counterfeit and falsified medicines online (European Commission), techniques of financial management among cocaine traffickers and illicit tobacco traders (European Commission), UK-China flows in the counterfeit goods trade (AHRC/ESRC), and my doctoral research on the changing nature of the British Pakistani honour/shame complex. This research has appeared in a number of articles and chapters in leading peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, in the books Fake Meds Online (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Fake Goods, Real Money (Policy Press, 2018), and in mainstream media (including the BBC, The Guardian, Vice and The Economist).

I am currently an Independent Social Research Foundation Early Career Fellow working on a project titled The Freeport Paradox. This builds on my previous research on global illicit product markets and flows to advance interdisciplinary knowledge of the political and criminogenic dimensions of special economic zones (SEZs), with an empirical focus on the UK’s new freeports. Alongside this, I continue my research and writing on various drug markets, as well as publications building on my PhD research that seek to contribute to work on diaspora and the culture-politics-economy nexus.

Substantive areas of expertise include:

• Crime and the global political economy 
• 'Organised crime' and illicit markets (drugs, counterfeit goods)
• Drug markets and drug dealing (pharmaceuticals, IPEDs, cocaine)
• Digital criminology
• Consumer culture
• Contemporary criminological theory
• Anthropological and ethnographic studies of honour and shame (particularly in the Pakistani diaspora)
• International political economy
• Qualitative and online research methods (particularly ethnography)

I welcome enquiries from potential PhD candidates in any of the areas above.