Alex joined the Department of Social Sciences at Northumbria University in September 2017 and is currently Head of Subject in Criminology and Sociology. She is an interdisciplinary criminologist whose research integrates approaches from criminology, sociology and political economy. Alex is an active member of various external research networks and learned societies, including Chair of the North East Branch of the British Society of Criminology. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as The British Journal of Criminology, The European Journal of Criminology, Trends in Organised Crime, and Drugs and Alcohol Today, among others. Her work has also appeared in mainstream media including the BBC, The Guardian, Vice and The Economist. Alex's books include Fake Meds Online (Palgrave Macmillan, with GA Antonopoulos) and Fake Goods, Real Money (Policy Press, with GA Antonopoulos, Jo Large, Anqi Shen, Mike Crang and Mike Andrews).

Alex’s research interests extend across the social sciences. Previous projects have focused on such wide-ranging 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 trade (AHRC/ESRC), and her doctoral research on the changing nature of the British Pakistani honour/shame complex. 

Her work is global and comparative and makes use of integrated theoretical frameworks and innovative qualitative, ethnographic and online methodologies. She has a strong commitment to cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborative work and to moving research findings beyond academia into the policy and practice arenas.

Alex is currently working on a number of research and writing projects. She is in the pilot phase of an ethnographic study of the illicit market in injectable cosmetic procedures and is writing up a related theoretical piece on human enhancement drugs and late-capitalist subjectivity. She is also working on publications from her doctoral research that seek to contribute to work on diaspora and the culture-politics-economy nexus. In future, Alex will continue her research on the production, distribution and consumption of illicit goods around the globe. Of particular interest is the use of special economic zones as global conduits of illicit trade.

Substantive areas of expertise include:

• Crime and the global political economy 
• 'Organised crime' and illicit markets
• Drug markets and drug dealing (pharmaceuticals, IPEDs, cocaine)
• Technology-facilitated crime
• Counterfeit markets and intellectual property crime
• Consumer culture
• Contemporary criminological theory
• Critical social and cultural theory (Bourdieu, Transnationalism, Intersectionality, the Frankfurt School)
• Anthropological and ethnographic studies of honour and shame (particularly in the Pakistani diaspora)
• International political economy (Marxism, Neo-Gramscianism, Cultural Political Economy)
• Political ideologies
• Qualitative and online research methods (particularly ethnography)

Alex welcomes enquiries from potential PhD candidates in any of the areas above.