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Dr Annalena Oppel

Research Fellow
International Inequalities Institute

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About

Annalena Oppel is a Leverhulme Early Career and Research Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE. Her current research examines how people reimagine success beyond meritocratic frameworks through collaborative digital storytelling across the UK, Brazil, and South Africa. She works at the intersection of inequality research and creative practice, using vernacular and visual methods not as supplementary tools but as legitimate forms of knowledge production.

Oppel holds a DPhil in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Her research interrogates the relationship between meritocracy, race, and coloniality, with particular attention to how mathematical and measurement logics reproduce inequality while appearing neutral. This includes examining wealth taxation attitudes, the politics of Black Tax, and how meritocratic formulas and rhetoric use mathematical symbols to naturalise distinction while claiming neutrality.

She is co-editor of Colonial Pasts and Inequality Today: The Racial Wealth Divide across South Africa and the UK (LSE Press, in press) and has a book manuscript under review with Pluto Press. Her work has been published in World Development, Social Identities, The European Journal of Development Research, and International Journal of Social Welfare, among others. She has held positions at UNU-WIDER (Research Associate), Harvard University (Visiting Fellow), and has consulted with GIZ, ODI, and the Global Development Network.

At LSE, Oppel teaches on the MSc Inequalities and Social Science, convening courses on intersectionality and social scientific analysis of inequalities.

Key expertise: Imagination, public discourse, storytelling, public policy, narrative change