Dr Helen Dixon (she/they) teaches on empowerment and social change, gender theory and feminist practice. At IDS, she co-convenes the Creative and Reflective Practice for Social Change module that is offered as part of some master’s courses delivered at IDS.

Helen is a bilingual British-Nicaraguan writer and poet, researcher-activist, and translator-interpreter. She is a member of the autonomous Memory Narrative and Histories Research Collective based in Brighton. Her critical research interests include: patriarchal coloniality and the nation state, decolonising feminisms from Abya Yala, and creative, reflective and decolonising forms of participatory methodology for social change.

After achieving an MA in Creative and Critical Writing with distinction at the University of Sussex, Helen was awarded a PhD by the University of Brighton for ‘A fictional poetic archive: the resistance of feminist decolonising memory-imaginaries to Nicaraguan patriarchal coloniality and British entanglements’.

With a background in participatory communications and collaborative arts in the 1980s, Helen co-founded the Nicaraguan feminist popular education and communications collective Grupo Venancia in 1991 and was active in the national feminist movement (currently in exile). Later, for more than a decade she worked as a national consultant with urban and rural organisations and NGOs on methodology, internal organisation, strategic and operative planning, MEL and the systematisation of experience, memory and histories. As part of this work, Helen authored extensive publications in Spanish on feminist histories, organisation and social change methodologies among other topics. More recently in English she has published on Nicaraguan civil society, Nicaraguan histories and the state, decolonial feminist understandings of memory and the imaginary, methodological practices and literary strategies, as well as temporality, essentialism, the multiplicitous self and relationality.

Helen has worked as the head of the Nicaragua team to research and co-author the Final Country Report for Nicaragua as part of the Evaluation of the Strategy for Support via Swedish Civil Society Organisations 2011-2014. She has taught Creative Writing at the Universities of Brighton and Chichester, as well as working on a 2019 process to decolonise and co-construct the curriculum, pedagogy and institutional relations of five undergraduate and MA modules, with BAME students, faculty and ATs from the Schools of English and Global Studies at the University of Sussex.

Helen is the author of two books of bilingual poetry and poetic prose and is included in multiple literary publications in Canada, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Spain and the UK. She also has experience in collective creation theatre, art photography, and performance art. She worked on two educational TV dramas in Nicaragua: Sexto Sentido TV and Contracorriente involving scriptwriting, participatory research and educational packages. Her current literary work is an experimental novel tracing the lives of people affected by the current crisis in Nicaragua and the inheritance of UK colonial histories on its Caribbean Shore.