A qualitative researcher with a background in sociocultural anthropology, Laura has worked on a wide range of interdisciplinary, intercultural projects as a researcher, editor, and translator, and as a project manager and facilitator in higher education, publishing, and NGO settings. She values genuinely interdisciplinary research, and has worked on social policy, health and adult social care, law reform, cultural politics, and environmental issues in Southeast Asia and the UK. She has a longstanding interest in qualitative and sociolegal research methods, and in ethnographic, participatory, narrative, and biographical approaches.
Laura has recently shifted her research focus from Indonesian to UK social policy, examining how legislation and legal guidance is devised, interpreted, and implemented in various public sector settings. Recent University of Birmingham projects include a QR-funded rapid response study of the Prevent Duty in relation to other statutory safeguarding duties in schools and colleges across the West Midlands (2023-2024) at Birmingham Law School; a NIHR-School for Social Care Research funded Social Work with Older People project (2022-2023) in the School of Social Policy, and an ESRC-funded rapid response study on the impact of Covid-19 emergency legislation on social care provision (2020-2022) at Birmingham Law School. Prior to this, she was project manager and research fellow for ‘Enabling Wayang to Contribute to Environmental Discourse in Indonesia’, a collaborative, multilingual project between Royal Holloway, University of London and the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta, funded by a British Council-Newton Fund Institutional Links grant (2019-2020).