Abigail is an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She has three years of experience teaching African history, politics and qualitative social sciences at the African Studies Centre within the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Her interdisciplinary research explores the role of educational institutions in postcolonial knowledge production and circulation.
Her doctoral thesis, Decoding ‘Balance’: Learning about the British Empire in English Secondary Schools, analysed students’ discursive constructions of imperialism over the course of a GCSE history module. She has also conducted research on teaching and learning post/colonial history in schools in South Africa and Northern Ireland. Her work extends to higher education, researching the perspectives of Ghanaian and Nigerian academics on the ways in which bibliometric coloniality structures global academic publishing.
She is an Affiliated Researcher with ‘A portrait of the teaching of the British Empire, migration and belonging in English secondary schools’. This collaborative research project brings together scholars from UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society and the University of Oxford’s Department of Education to support teaching and learning about the history of the British Empire and its legacies within British culture, politics and society today.
She holds postgraduate degrees in Post-Conflict and Transitional Justice (University of Cape Town), in Education, Globalisation and International Development (University of Cambridge) and in African Studies (University of Oxford).
Publications
Post-Colonial and Post-Conflict History Education
Abigail Branford, ‘”I’m not Catholic and I’m not Protestant”: Identity, individualisation and challenges for history education in Northern Ireland’, History Education Research Journal, 18 (2), 2021.
Abigail Branford, ‘Transitions, Truth-Telling and Teaching History’, Cambridge Open-Review Educational Research e-Journal, Vol. 4, 2017.
Academic Publishing Practices in West Africa
David Mills, Patricia Kingori, Abigail Branford, Samuel Chatio, Natasha Robinson and Paulina Tindana, Whose Knowledge Counts? Ghanaian Academic Publishing and Global Science, (African Minds: Cape Town), 2023. [Featured in an editorial for Nature]
David Mills and Abigail Branford, ‘Getting by in a Bibliometric Economy: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Credibility in the Nigerian Academy’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 92 (5), 2022.
David Mills, Abigail Branford, Kelsey Inouye, Natasha Robinson & Patricia Kingori, “Fake” Journals and the Fragility of Authenticity: Citation Indexes, “Predatory” Publishing, and the African Research Ecosystem’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 33 (3), 2021.
