I joined as an LSE Fellow in Social Policy in 2025, having been a postdoctoral research fellow at Warwick Law School on its Leverhulme-funded Vulnerable State Project. Trained in both anthropology and law, I completed my doctoral and undergraduate studies at the LSE.

As a specialist in ethnographic research of policy worlds, I am particularly experienced in multi-sited and institutional fieldwork. My work seeks to 'repatriate' critical scholarship about humanitarianism and international development to better understand the state of welfare and policing in the UK. I am especially interested in questions of deservingness, access to justice and homelessness policy. More broadly, I am interested in the lifeworlds and moral emotions of frontline workers and their institutions, especially the ambivalent and contradictory feelings that arise from enacting care in institutional settings. I start from the premise that policy only becomes a reality through the labour of these officials.

My doctoral thesis asks what it means to work in the business of ending homelessness in England. I spent eighteen months across advice services, night shelters, local authority offices and street outreach, participating as a worker and volunteer across these spaces whilst interviewing colleagues and beneficiaries about their experiences. Offering an ethnographic account of aid ‘at home’, my thesis focuses on a regularly neglected aspect of scholarly coverage of homelessness: the moral labour, disputes, tragedies and contradictions negotiated everyday by frontline workers at the coalface of the homeless industry. My findings foreground the futility that is hardwired into the post-austerity push to end homelessness in the UK, revealing the feedback loop of apparent state failure and virtuous firefighting that is at the heart of the enterprise.

My postdoctoral research pursues similar questions of the recent mainstreaming of ‘vulnerability’ as a core focus of contemporary British policing, conducting eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with public protection detectives. With project lead Ana Aliverti, we jointly authored a comparative analysis of why, and how, do both asylum officers and public protection detectives claim care as a central ideal to make sense of their own work. Earlier, as part of an larger team project, I analysed Hansard transcripts of what became the 2015 Modern Slavery Act, contributing to the argument that both its punitive and humanitarian aspects were inseparable and mutually constitutive – a ‘complex’.

Publications

Tawfic, S. (in press). Circuits of outrage against and within the English state of homelessness. In A. Aliverti, A. Chamberlen, H. Carvalho & S. Tawfic (Eds). The Embodied State edited collection.

Aliverti, A., Carvalho, H., Chamberlen, A. & Tawfic, S. (eds. in press). The Embodied State: Emotions, State Power & Social Marginalisation, London: Routledge.

Aliverti, A. J., & Tawfic, S. (2025). Caring states? Bureaucratic care, moral ideals and emotional dilemmas in British asylum and policing. Theoretical Criminology, OnlineFirst, 1-19

Carvalho, H., Foreman, S., Tawfic, S., Aliverti, A., Chamberlen, A., & Rawson, B. (2025). Modern Slavery and the Punitive–Humanitarian Complex. The British Journal of Criminology, 65(1), 93-109

Lewis, D., Bowers, R., Heslop, L., & Tawfic, S. (2024). Ecosystems of Advice: Unfolding Dynamics of Business and Development in South Asia. Journal of South Asian Development, 19(3), 345-363

Tawfic, S. (2022). Review of Making Better Lives by Johannes Lenhard. Housing, Theory and Society, 39(5), 633–634