Dr Jana Melkumova-Reynolds

Jana Melkumova-Reynolds is a cultural sociologist whose research straddles theoretical and methodological approaches from the social sciences and from the arts and humanities. Her areas of expertise include time and temporalities, cultural production, material and visual culture, and disability studies. Her work in these areas is underpinned by feminist and queer epistemologies and methodologies. Embodied and emplaced, it is rooted in phenomenology and draws on affect theory and ANT.

Key expertise: Cultural Work, Fashion, Time, Disability Studies, Embodiment, Affect Theory

Jana is interested in the emergence of subjectivities under the (cultural) conditions of late capitalism, characterised by precarious employment, the aestheticisation of everyday life, growing imperatives to embrace and enact geographical, social and professional mobility, and the injunction to manage incalculable risks while retaining an affective investment in the future. She is also interested in counter-emergences; in cultural imaginaries and practices that conjure alternative subjectivities, non-normative ways of being, and future-orientations premised on ‘hope without optimism’. This informs her recent focus on queer and crip utopias.

In 2024, Jana launched Embodied Theory Lab, a platform that brings together crip and non-disabled movement artists, academics and activists to think through theoretical concepts and social, political and cultural idea(l)s in ways that make space for embodied, uncodified, tacit and practice-based knowledges. Using crip communities’ lived experiences as a ‘body of knowledge’, the project aims to conjure socialities, relationalities and shared temporalities premised on interdependence, response-ability and radical care, through a series of movement- and theory-based workshops.

Prior to academia, Jana worked in the creative industries across four countries for over 15 years, and this experience informs both her teaching and her research.

Jana is part of the Knowledge, Culture and Technology research cluster.

Jana co-leads the MSc Culture and Society , where she convenes the core course on Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms. She also convenes both undergraduate and postgraduate qualitative research methods courses.

Jana welcomes projects that focus on disability studies and crip theory, cultural theory, cultural and creative industries, queer theory, embodiment, time and temporalities. Her current PhD students are Danielle Cutts, Matt Reynolds, David Ilkiw, Maria Persu and Zaina Salama.