A view of Singleton Campus including Singleton Park and the beach, with the sea stretching into the horizon.
a head shot of dr lella nouri

Dr Lella Nouri

Associate Professor, Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy

Email address

Welsh language proficiency

Basic Welsh Speaker
Available For Postgraduate Supervision
Media Commentator

About

Lella Nouri is an Associate Professor of Criminology and the Co-Director of the University’s Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC). Lella is also a Co-Director of the 7.5m EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Enhanced Human Interactions and Collaborations with Data and Intelligence Driven Systems.

Lella’s research specialism is in extremism, terrorist use of the internet and in particular extreme right ideologies as well as hate crime.

Lella’s most recent work focuses on combatting hate visuals in communities across Wales. Lella is the inventor of the innovative ‘StreetSnap’ app, which was developed in collaboration with the Legal Innovation Lab Wales and Bridgend Community Safety Partnership. Lella also runs a community impact project in relation to anti-hate crime, Flip the Streets, which helps communities to build resilience to hate.

Alongside this Lella has researched widely on extremist use of the internet including far and extreme right narratives, their dissemination via social media and provided recommendations for policy and community responses.

As well as co-organising numerous community and academic events on these topics, including a VOX-Pol extreme right workshop, Lella has published a variety of edited collections, journal articles, book chapters, research reports and blogs through leading publishers in the field.

Stakeholder and community impact and engagement work is at the heart of her research. Lella’s has most recently been appointed as an Anti-Racist Wales Research Expert for the Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan as part of the External Accountability Group. She is also an active member of the following expert groups/networks: Academic-Practitioner Counter Extremism Network (APCEN) for the Commission for Counter Extremism (UK Home Office), Member of the Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE) Research Network, Homeland Security Group at the UK Home Office as well as the UK Counter-Terrorism Policing Evidence-Based Review Group. In 2017/18, Lella held a visiting scholar position at the University of California, Santa Barbara on a Fulbright Cyber Security Award.

Lella is also keen to work university wide and is currently one of the University’s Morgan Advanced Studies Institute Fellows and Co-Chair of the University’s Race Equality Network (SIREN).

Areas Of Expertise

  • Counter-terrorism
  • Extreme right
  • Terrorist use of the internet
  • Radicalisation
  • Hate crime
  • Anti-racism
  • Race equality & the CJS

Career Highlights

Research

 

Dr. Lella Nouri is the founder of the 'Flip the Streets' initiative. The project commenced in May 2023, initially funded by Race Council Cymru and is now in its second phase being funded through Swansea Council’s Community Safety Partnership.

The project, working alongside Fresh Creative uses art inspired initiatives to deliver and present on projects. In Swansea to date, this collaboration has included events held at the Evolve Hub in Gorseinon, Manselton Community Centre and most recently in Swansea City Centre. These events aim to use hate graffiti as a starting point of conversation with community groups with the purpose of de-normalising hate and using positive representations of graffiti, created by the community groups involved to showcase thought-provoking artwork that confronts and denounces hate in Wales.

Award Highlights Collaborations