Francesca Peruzzo

Francesca Peruzzo is a Research Fellow in Educational Equity and Policy at the University of Birmingham. She works on the politics and governance of education, with a particular focus on how policy shifts shape inclusion, disability, and the experiences of disadvantaged students in an increasingly digital landscape. Her research examines the role of the state, the rise of privatisation, and the ways global and national policy dynamics play out in everyday educational practice.

Her research centres disability justice, racialised and lower-income students, and Global South perspectives. She bridges policy analysis with participatory, student-led methods to study how ableism is produced in higher education and how schools and universities navigate competing pressures around equity. Francesca has published across sociology of education, policy studies, and critical disability studies. She is co-author of Students, teachers, families, and a socially just education: Rewriting the grammar of schooling to unsettle identities (Lived Places Publishing), with a forthcoming book tilted Shifting landscapes in digital education policy: More-than-human education governance and new materialisms (with Paolo Landri).

Her work has been funded by the Office for Students, YTL Foundation, the Sociological Review Foundation and the Department for Education.