Dr Beniamino Cislaghi
PhD, FHEA, FRSA
Assistant Professor
in Social Norms
LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom
Before joining the academia Ben worked for various NGOs and International Organisations, including UNICEF, WHO, and ILO. After his PhD, on human rights and social change, he worked for three years in Senegal as the Director of Research, Monitoring, and Evaluation of the NGO Tostan - an NGO internationally recognised for their work on social norms in West Africa. During this time, he also worked as a qualitative researcher with Stanford and Columbia Universities.
At the LSHTM he is gathering a community of experts on social norms, advancing existing understanding of how norms change and how that change can be measured. He is also contributing to the LINEA project. He is also part of various initiatives on social norms, led respectively by Georgetown University, LSE, Stanford University, and ODI. He collaborates with NGOs to integrate social norms into their interventions and measurement.
Teaching
Module Organiser: Ethics, Public Health and Human Rights.
Supervision: Msc students and 2 brave PhD candidates, one studying the role of social norms in driving STIs in rural Panama and the other one investigating ethical issues of interventions addressing violence against women in low and middle income countries.
Research
Ben is interested in how social norms influence health-related behaviour. With Lori Heise, he has advanced a theory of social norms (Theory of Normative Spectrum) to help understand the difference strength that norms can play on behaviour.
His recent research has explored how development interventions can empower people for community-based responses to local and global challenges, a topic he wrote on with Diane Gillespie and Gerry Mackie in Values Deliberation and Collective Action: Community Empowerment in Rural Senegal (2016, Palgrave Macmillan). He has further researched this topic with Solava Ibrahim (Manchester and Cambridge). His second book, Human Rights and Community-led Development (forthcoming, EUP) is a qualitative study of how the members of a rural Senegalese community responded to the human rights education classes of the NGO Tostan, and looks in particular at the dynamics of social change that sparked from those classes.
