New: The holders of the 2025-26 awards
The winner of the 2025-26 award for a PhD student registered at a member university of the ACU outside the UK is Mariah Faridah Muli.
Faridah is a PhD candidate and HFG Africa Fellow attached to the Department of Diplomacy and International Studies at University of Nairobi-Kenya. She lectures at the University of Nairobi and serves as a Research and Policy Fellow at the HORN International Institute for Strategic Studies. She has extensive experience in international relations and security issues and has contributed to regional policy dialogues, including the EU–IGAD Taskforce on the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. She also writes opinion pieces for The Daily Nation newspaper in Kenya.
Faridah’s PhD research focuses on Digital Technologies in Counterterrorism and Violent Extremism Prevention in the Horn of Africa in the context of how states like the U.S. are assisting in combating terrorism through strategic partnership. She examines how digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, and online monitoring tools are reshaping counterterrorism and their implications on governance and civil liberties.
She intends to use the Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentship award to improve and deepen her research and undertake essential fieldwork in Nigeria. This fieldwork will strengthen the comparative dimension of her study by generating rich empirical data to complement her research in Kenya.
The winner of the 2025-26 award for a PhD student registered at a university in the UK is Sandeep Hegade.
Sandeep is a PhD fellow at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh. His doctoral research examines social stratification in India’s elite private schools, focusing on how institutional design, regulatory autonomy, and policy silences contribute to the reproduction of social hierarchy under the guise of meritocracy.
Sandeep’s broader research spans education policy, the sociology of inequality, and public policy, with particular emphasis on institutional exclusion, affirmative action, and postcolonial governance. He employs a range of methods—including ethnography, mixed-methods analysis, and spatial diagnostics—to interrogate how educational and infrastructural regimes structure opportunity and reinforce privilege. His mixed-methods study on resistance to affirmative action has been published in the International Journal of Educational Development. His work has also appeared in Economic & Political Weekly, where he introduces a novel discussion on functional exclusion in rural infrastructure policy, challenging the myth of technocratic neutrality and advocating for caste as a central analytic in policy processes.
With the support of the Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentship award, Sandeep will undertake a comparative policy study of affirmative action and elite schooling in India, South Africa, and Malaysia. This project explores how colonial legacies and postcolonial statecraft shape access to elite educational institutions across Commonwealth countries. His research aims to inform debates on equity, governance, and institutional reform, contributing to scholarship across education, social policy, and international development.
