Who we are

Matt's research focus is interdisciplinary, at the intersection of psychology, ecology, philosophy, history and qualitative and creative research methods.

His interests include human-nature and human-animal relations, multispecies, posthumanities, animal studies, human and more-than-human worlds and animist worldviews - especially in the context of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene.

Matt is an experienced qualitative researcher, increasingly interested in arts-based research methods, creative, visual and comics-based research.  

His teaching focus overlaps with his research interests, and incorporates ecopsychology, ecotherapy, critical environmental psychology and mental health.

From October 2022 - October 2024 he was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship, titled 'Pavlov and the kingdom of dogs: Storying experimental animal histories through arts-based research'. The Fellowship involved the development of creative, arts-based and visual methods to challenge conventional perceptions of animal experimentation, the nature of scientific work, and the history of Psychology.

I am fascinated by design and seek opportunities to expand and diversify the discipline. I am motivated by systemic complexity and disciplinary ways of knowing. Areas of particular interest are social innovation and sustainable futures, morality and ethics in design, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration.

My research activities seek to achieve social benefit through design. My approach to research is practice-based and generally conducted in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines.

Research projects conducted in pursuit of these ambitions include:

“Anticipating Futures: Forecasting and Climate Preparedness for Co-located Hazards in India (ANTICIPATE)”. Partners: University of Brighton (UK), Institute of Development Studies (UK), All India Disaster Management Institute (IN). Funder British Academy, Knowledge Frontiers Scheme.

‘Inter-Disciplinary Education Agenda (IDEA): An essential driver for innovation’, Funded by the EU TEMPUS scheme. This project helped to improve knowledge exchange and innovation between engineering and design disciplines and business, in higher education institutes.

‘The Human Body Form’ A collaborative arts/medicine pedagogic research study investigating the potential benefits of drawing as a method for inter-disciplinary learning.

‘Designing for the Future’ a multi-disciplinary design competition that seeks to develop design innovations to benefit an ageing population, sponsored by The Future Perfect Company.

'Using Biomechanical data to inform student learning about chair design.' The study, which aimed to develop innovative models for interdisciplinary teaching, was funded by the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Design (CETLD).

The successful completion of this project led to a second CETLD-funded research study titled: 'Design in the Clinical Environment.' The project was a further development of the interdisciplinary teaching model identified during the previous research and moved the focus from the chair to the built environment.

I am an External Reviewer for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC); and Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA).

I am a critical social and community psychologist using discourse analysis and creative methods to look at how people are making sense of themselves and their lives in the context of neoliberalism. Previous research has included participatory work with lived-experience researchers to explore the role of arts in mental health; and a discursive approach to exploring contemporary constructions of happiness and wellbeing.

Dr Nicola Ashmore is a Principal Lecturer in Art and Design History. Her research and curatorial interests include collective remakings of Picasso’s Guernica for social change and creative practices for sustainable international development. She is committed to working collaboratively and developing international networks of artists and institutions interested in progressing the use of arts and culture for social change.

Nicola has made use of film documentary and digital technologies as research methodologies, investigating collaborative art practices and site-specific community artworks. She has published in several journals and has enjoyed co-authoring various publications.

Duncan is a part-time Principal Lecturer and Climate Literacy Champion based at the University of Brighton. He has recently been made Chair of the University of Brighton's Industry Advisory Board for Architecutre. Duncan is a qualified Chartered RIBA Architect who has practised, researched, and taught around issues of sustainable design, the Circular Economy and closed-loop systems for over 25 years. He recently authored the second edition of popular 'The Re-Use Atlas: a designer's guide towards a circular economy' published by RIBA. Duncan also co-authored 'The Pedagogies of Re-Use' publihsed in 2024 by Routledge which is based on the findings of a digital Summar School curated by Duncan in 2021. Known as the 'International School of Re-Construction' it was funded by the NWE Interreg FCRBE research project and involved over 80 students from across the world, plus academics and industry leaders from the world of the circular economy and creative re-use. 

Duncan has worked on projects as diverse as 'The Greenwich Millennium Village' in London with Ralph Erskine, the RIBA’s ‘House of the Future’, and more recently the multi-award-winning New Country House & Estate Master Plan in Hadlow Down East Sussex. He is perhaps best known for a series of thought-provoking ‘house’ projects testing issues of sustainable design and resource management including 'The House that Kevin Built’ in 2008 and ‘The Brighton Waste House’ in 2014.

Duncan is currently the Principal Investigator for two separate Interreg research programmes. One considers the viability of local waste flows to be processed into insulation for the social housing sector. The other, in partnership with Rotor DC of Brussels tests ideas associated with deconstructing late 20th Century/ early 21st Century buildings and re-constructing them. He lectures widely on issues relating to sustainable development and the circular economy in the design and construction industries. In December 2018 Duncan delivered a keynote address ‘Designers can save Planet Earth’ at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College. He is the curator of the annual ‘Waste Zone’ at FutureBuild; a three-day symposium and exhibition focusing on discussing many of the most pressing issues presenting the emerging concept of Circular Cities, involving over 50 invited speakers including Prof. Walter Stahel, Prof. Michael Braungart, Clare Ollerenshaw (LWARB), Gillie Hobbs (BRE), Dr. Zoe Laughlin (Inst.of Making) and David Benjamin of New York’s ‘The Living’.

Duncan’s research tests the viability of a number of practices and materials, recognising the potential of discarded “waste” as a valuable resource in the future of construction, as well as live projects as valuable teaching aides. Through his projects he fosters community development and regeneration, working with apprentice builders and students, informing young people of all ages as to their role in sustainable living. Duncan creates examples of community practice that, through the use of innovative techniques such as ‘resource mapping’ can redefine what local materials are and match them with local skills and trades.

Duncan has taught at both undergraduate and post-graduate level since 1994, recently running an undergraduate design studio at the School of Architecture & Design, as well as coordinating undergraduate Technology & Professional Practices modules. His research practice informs his teaching, and vice versa. Duncan recently coordinated the design and construction of the multi-award-winning Brighton Waste House with over 360 undergraduate students, volunteers, and apprentices. As well as being a successful ‘live project’ and pedagogic tool, it is also Europe’s first permanent building made of waste material and the host of a number of funded on-going research projects.

I trained as an architect and practice as an artist, with an interdisciplinary, research-based practice.

My recent practice and research has explored material poetics, memory, heritage and regeneration. In my PhD, 'Détour and Retour: Practices and poetics of salt as narratives of relation and re-generation in Brixton', I developed ideas that linked material cultures of salt through a series of journeys to a 'poetics of re-generation', expanding the language of regeneration and spatialising relational practice to emphasise an ethics of regeneration practices. I'm interested in the material cultures of migration and trade and in the relevance and significance of everyday practices, rituals and engagement with material culture to how places are made and continue to be remade and maintained. My book, Salted Earth: poetics of place and migration through four artistic journeys, will be published by Intellect in 2025.

My research and practice engages with place, and the public realm. I'm interested in how artistic interventions and critical spatial practices that highlight and reveal poetics of place could contribute to more ethical and effective models of regeneration and heritage practices (including a more ethical engagement with memory traces and their relation to the new).

I’m a board member of ixia (public art sector support) and am engaged in current research and policy around public art in the UK.

I originally trained in participatory research methods and tools and I bring an in depth knowledge and experience of participation and socially engaged practice to my teaching, research and practice, across architecture, art and design.

Current and recent research projects and networks:

A Difficult Place: Cost of Living collaborative film project

This Ignite 3.1 (AHRC impact funding) funded project has worked with people living in the East Brighton area to create a film documenting experiences of the current cost of living crisis. In partnership with Phoenix Food Shop, an affordable food project based in the Phoenix Community Centre, we identified people who are currently using their resources and then worked with these individuals to tell their stories, supported by myself and filmmaker (John Edwards). The resulting film, ‘A Difficult Place’, has been screened in Brighton and will be shared at a forthcoming webinar and at a London venue. This project aims to document the experiences that people are going through on a local level and to share these stories more widely so that these stories become more visible and people are not just seen as statistics.

The Salt Art Research Network is an international network of artists and curators working with, or interested in working with salt as material and theme of artistic practice. Members are currently based in the UK and Italy and have affiliations with the University of Brighton, Teesside University, Goldsmiths and University of Turin. In 2024 the Network is collaborating with NICHE, Universita Ca’ Foscari in Venice for a workshop event which is planned to lead to further research activities in 2025.

The DISTERRA network is funded by the UKRI’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. It is hosted at the University of Edinburgh and led by Nichola Khan, and Zoha Waseem (University of Warwick). It crosses knowledge boundaries by bringing together transdisciplinary academics, public audiences, artists and creative practitioners to explore ‘terrains of disappearance’ in forced migration, armed conflict, and environmental crisis across Asia-Europe. Its aim is to link typically separated regional or single-issue fields of inquiry. It brings together transdisciplinary scholarship and a creative arts focus to interrogate migrant disappearances as a generalised Asia-Europe phenomenon, but one with particularity in specific emplaced environments. It expands the priority given to border-related disappearances in migration by examining wider interactions of migration with forced displaced and disappearances as forms of absence in everyday life, including in cities.

Acts of Transfer – research project with Dr Lizzie Lloyd, UWE.

A practice-based research project, into the documentation and legacies of socially engaged practice and critical writing about the practice (2021-22). The project was funded by Arts Council England, and the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at UoB, and outcomes included 2 symposia at UoB, talks at Arnolfini and workshops at Towner Eastbourne and Fontys University. A book, Acts of Transfer, published by Social Art Publications is available. We are currently working on a online exposition showcasing the films and texts produced in the project.

Origination

An ongoing artistic research and practice project in collaboration with my sister, artist Rebecca Beinart, which we have been working on since 2008. Beginning as an investigation into our family history and migrations, growing into a wider project about the materiality, memory, and rituals of migration and diaspora, we have used performance, sculpture, film and other media to explore lost and invisible heritages. Outputs in 2024 included a residency at Fabrica and we have a forthcoming book chapter out in 2025.

Gothic art and Literature

c18th and 19th art and literature

Art History

Roma, Traveller and Gypsy cultures

Mental illness in art and the media

Disability Studies

Sue is interested in interdisciplinary perspectives on visual arts archives in theory and practice, bridging discourses of critical archive studies and other humanities disciplines. Her engagement takes place at the intersection of stewardship, research and creative activities, involving a range of approaches to the notional and physical archive.  In both analogue and digital forms, this work in essence reflects on the place and nature of archives in contemporary culture.  Specialising in visual arts archives, she works collaboratively with scholars, art and design practitioners, collections practitioners and community groups, using a range of approaches. Her work investigates the archive as both a product and a site of creative practice, and looks ‘under the bonnet’ of art and design historical research and asks: what is the archive doing?  To this end, her research is often grounded in the embodied practitioner knowledge generated from the collections with which she has worked, largely focussing on twentieth century British art and design and their contexts, particularly the mid-century.  So for example she has reflected on the archival practices of emigre designers, and on materiality in the encounter with the visual arts archive.  She has particular expertise on the archive and work of the designer FHK Henrion (1914-1990), held at the Design Archives.

Eloise Calandre works with photography, writing, performance, digital mixed reality, moving image and drawing. Her work focuses on interplay between image and material form and explores positioning of the body in relation to place, time and encounter, often producing site-responsive work. Her research explores an interplay between critical theory and creative writing.

Thematic areas of enquiry currently include:

Fantastic of female experience; age and metamorphosis

Shape-shifting, movement and dance

The role of Light & Shadow in photography’s visual haptics

Residual Encounter, the body’s location in time & place

Seeing the Unseen;  histories of mixed reality & illusion

Mobile Materiality & Glitch

Virtuality; relationships between digital space and material ephemera

I have been focused on my transition from an occupational therapist in clinical practice to senior lecturer of occupational therapy. I now feel ready to focus on & develop my research interests. 

The perpetual thread throughout all of my research ideas is belonging, an integral but under explored dimension of occupational science. I am developing my understanding of visual research methods, currently photo-elicitation, and I am keen to explore possible collaborations with members of the arts and humanities community to form innovative partnerships and actualise creative research. 

Other areas that I am interested in include:

Collaborative student creative projects- using the underpinning philosphy of engagement and particpation in occupational therapy to nurture a sense of student belonging with each other and their own learning journey. For the last three years I have facilitated a creative student legacy project and I am interested to explore the layers of meaning in greater depth.  

Occupational therapy and community development- I have a great passion for community development and have set up and co-founded various projects, including a community hub (which aims to promote social inclusion and reduce isolation) and a community orchard. 

Intergenerational activities- I created and continue to run an Intergenerational Supper Club which provides opportunity for younger and older people to participate, interact, share stories and explore activities together.  

Emma is a published crafts designer, author, content creator and lecturer. She has significant experience of creating and developing online communities and understands the secrets of content creation and social media. She has a utilitarian approach to her research which centres around sustainability, handmaking, communities and the power to communicate through visual narratives.

An active researcher, she has supported and led on various funded projects for AHRC, Design Museum, Culture Shift and Community21 focussing on making as a form of connecting and communicating.

She is currently undertaking a PhD on how digital connections create forms of analogue collaboration. The research from this has already resulted in the development of a new Content Creation BA(Hons) that looks at content creation as creative practice and asks students to explore the constantly changing relationship between creativity, ourselves and digital platforms.

It has also become the foundation for a book on Minfulness in Making published by Leaping Hare press, exploring the relationship between making and connection with eco-systems, the past, the future and how we can understand the material world. She is set to complete it by 2027.

Amy Cunningham is a multidisciplinary artist, lecturer and researcher, who uses the singing voice, video, materials and drawing to explore the texture, patterns and glitches in technologies and environments. Addressing both the obsolete and the futuristic, her artworks have included a fictional computer game in a real 18th century garden, opera as a video installation and an Internet broadcast as a song cycle. Currently she is developing a series of work which explores the relationships between the architecture of leisure, wildlife and industry within coastal environments.

Selected works on video can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/amycunningham

A recent body of work ‘The Difference Machine’ focussed on the role and representation of women in the assimilation of technology into culture. This work has taken the form of a series of performances and installations for voice, sound, music composition and video. The first two works in the series 'Personal Wireless' and 'On Standby' were exhibited at Soundwaves Festival Brighton and St James's Piccadilly London in 2011. The third work in the series 'Oracle' was exhibited at IKON Gallery Birmingham as part of Autumn Almanac: The Voice and the Lens, curated by Third Ear and Sam Belinfante in 2012.The most recent work in this series 'Smart Appliances' for soprano voice, cello and video was first performed as part of Sounding Food and Music curated by Contemporary Connections, The Old Market Theatre, Hove, UK 2014.

The exploration of the mediated voice in her practice is underpinned by a wider investigation into the role of the voice in contemporary art. The Voice Laboratory, a research network founded by Amy in 2009 initiates cross-disciplinary debate and acts as a platform for new work by way of symposia, seminars, workshops, performances and exhibitions.

Professor Julie Doyle researches in media and communication and is an authority on climate communication. Her research examines the ways in which media and culture shape our understandings of, and responses to, climate change.

With a particular focus upon visual and creative communication, Prof. Doyle works collaboratively with visual artists and cultural educators, and has provided consultancy for environmental NGOs, government and the sustainability communications sector on best practice for climate and environmental communication. Her research on media and climate change has been cited in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Scientfiic Assessment Reports (IPCC 2018, 2022).

Professor Doyle was a member of the founding Board of Directors of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA) and was Director of the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics. She was the University's Unit of Assessment Lead for Communication, Media and Cultural Studies; Library and Information Management (REF 2021).

Watch Professor Doyle's inaugural lecture, 'Communicating Climate Change in an Age of (Un)Certainty' (May 2017).

Research Impact

Professor Doyle co-authored a REF2021 impact case study on Mobilising Visual Communication for Socio-Political Change

Dr Claire Dungey is a research fellow on the project 'Ageism in Ai: New forms of age discrimination and exclusion in the era of algorithms and artificial intelligence (project PI Maria Sourbati). This research involves doing qualitative interviews with transport/AI developers as well as older participants over 60 using smart technologies and transport services in Brighton and London. 

Claire is an anthropologist with an expertise within the areas of surveillance, transport and mobility and well as childhood and youth studies. 

Scholarly bibliography: Claire has a BA, MSc and PhD degree in anthropology from Aarhus University.

Prior to joining the University of Brighton, Claire Dungey has done extensive research with families exploring transitions over the lifecourse and future aspirations, e.g. in rural Lesotho (Brunel University London) and south western Uganda (Aarhus University). Her PhD fieldwork is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda on schooling, youth transitions and friendships. In Claire's most recent work at King's College London she explored how family members in Germany monitor their children in real-time using surveillance apps as a form of care, but also how other families resist these technologies and are critical of data capitalism. 

Claire has also done participatory work within the area of mobility and transport in city contexts in African countries (Tunis, Abuja and Cape Town) involving peer researchers and policy makers in the research project (Durham University).

Areas of interest:

The anthropology of education

The anthropology of futures

Digital Anthropology

Surveillance studies

Mobility studies

My research interests are rooted in material and process led design practice and the refined evolution of form through integrated function. Drawing on biomimetic and emergence design principles, craft skills and advanced materials, my research explores the use of textiles as a versatile hierarchical fibre based material and multi cloth structures. These properties offer designers the ability to integrate and place multiple functions (both practical and aesthetic) within a single material at the point of production. Like many biological structures, textiles have the potential to maximise performance while utilizing minimal resources.

This research is conducted under three clear areas which although connected, identify and explore different aspects of my research interest.

The first area progresses from my PhD thesis and explores the integration of active elements within woven structures to enable specific functions. With an emphasis on active shape memory textiles and the integration of wire form nitinol (nickel titanium, shape memory alloy) into multi-cloth woven textiles, this area explores dynamic control and shape transfer in flexible materials and offers the potential to generate unique properties in this bi-material composite. As a result, the stiffness and elastic behaviour of the textile can be controlled remotely, modifying the cloths surface and form. This gives further latitude for the textile designer to adapt a combination of functional and aesthetic properties with the potential for applications to include apparel, medical textiles, and engineering.

The second area focuses on the development of multi-cloth woven structures for use in ridged and transitional multi-ply composites for increased structural integrity as well as the manipulation of properties across a single material. The use of linen in these structures maximises performance while minimising the environmental impact and has the potential to be integrated into a wide range of applications as well as replacing other composites like Carbon fibre where the high levels of performance are not required. This area is also linked to my Jewellery practice which utilises textiles composites while exploring the flexibility and adaptation of rigid materials using joints and mechanisms.

The third area combines woven and dyeing techniques to focus on the aesthetics of simplicity and uncontrolled processes, allowing the resulting pieces to be a simple expression of material, process and function. Informed by traditional craft skills and the selection and placement of fibres and structures, pre-determined elements are integrated into a cloth before the application of finishing processes which reveal hidden or unpredictable qualities. Focusing on the underlying inspiration of traditional crafts instead of their resulting product, I look to place my work within a contemporary context, rather than it becoming a homage to that which has gone before.

Sarah is a practising Textile Designer/Maker with a specialism in Knitwear. She is an ECR and her research interests focus on investigating circular, sustainable, and transparent practises with the Fashion and Textiles industry, primarily focussing on new ways to use/reuse/recycle/repurpose/remake & manufacture ‘waste’ textiles and yarn.

This research feeds directly into her teaching with students, as she believes an understanding of these current issues within Fashion and Textiles are key for students looking to work within the industry to grasp, and hopefully give them the know-how and the tools to find creative & modern solutions to this issue on both a global and local scale.

Sarah graduated from Winchester School of Art in 2003 with a 1st class honours degree in Textile Design, and then went straight on to complete her Masters at the RCA in 2005 with an MA in Menswear Knitwear. Since then has worked in both commercial and high-end design studios as a Freelance Knitwear designer, including Michiko Koshino, River Island, and Sid Bryan Knitwear consultancy. In 2010 she set up her own Knitwear Accessory label, focussing on working with small-scale specialist UK based Knitwear producers, to allow her to produce a high-end, and sustainable product, promoting British Knitwear manufacturing. 

She has taught in HE institutions in Knitwear Design for 13 years, and currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Professional Practice for Fashion and Textiles here at the University of Brighton, alongside her role as Course Leader for Textiles.

 Research interests include 

Playwriting - I have written six plays, using personal experience, political events and visual materials. These included plays at Royal Court Theatre, Soho Theatre, Cockpit Theatre, with Paines Plough and on regional and national tours.  I am interesrting in playwriting practice as research, Iautoethnographic plays, co writing,  political theatre, women's theatre. 

My MA dissertation explored working class women's autobiography (MA dissertation and I worked for many years for community publishers Queenspark Books, runnning swriting groups for local working writers, publishing pamphlets of work and organising open mic events. 

Screenwriting practice  - as a screenwriter and script editor, I am a member of the Screenwriters Research Network and am particularly interested in  TV writing and   screenplays by women,  films for young people, and writing the short film. I currently have an award by Digital Learning Partners Initiative to develop filmmaking skills with MA and undergraduate screenwriters .I am also interested in  of the script editor  globally in feature films and TV.

I am a member of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing and Performance and Community

Marco is a Lecturer in Psychology and Counselling.

His background sits at the interface between developmental psychology, organisational studies, community art, social justice and well-being promotion, involving individuals, families, occupational environments and communities.

Marco is also a social scientist, with experience as a counsellor and as a psychologist with a whole system approach. His interests include community art, well-being and resilience of children, families, workers, LGTQIA+ communities, NHS, teachers, and people facing multiple challenges.Marco's expertise lies in the use of quantitative and qualitative methods within a (critical) constructivist methodology. He encourages his students to use co-productive and creative methods, including community theatre, to promote well-being, resilience, academic resilience, equity, and equality for children, young people and minorities (including gender studies, low-income, SEN, LGBTQIA+, and ethnic minorities).

My research is in embodied materiality, has led to questioning in-depth areas of emotions around complicated grief and memory using methodologies of affect in making paper, evolving into paintings, drawings and sculpture. Presenting at international conferences, making work for exhibitions. 

In 2018, I gained my PhD Textiles from the Royal College of Art. I have a First Class Honours in Fashion and Textiles, and an MA in Learning and Teaching. 

Making paper became a metaphor for skin-to-skin, skin-on-skin, remaking the used and reused into new, analysing embodied materiality in its essence creating substrates at the encounter of the elemental. The textile and fashion processes of unravelling, unfolding in both cloth and paper become material conductors of our passage through life. Edges, raw, fragile and delicate became the metaphor for maternal loss and the emotional unease in complicated mourning. My installations have been exhibited at the International Paper Biennale, Shanghai, China in 2019, 2021, and more recently Tiawan, 2023. 

Research has been made in 2021 as co-investigator with AHRC project on Sustainable Materials in the Creative Industries, a 12 month scoping project in the areas of Fashion, Textiles, Accessories and Leather in waste and how waste is managed in these industries, in collaboration with the PI at Royal College of Art, and other co-i's at the University of Edinburgh and University of Plymouth. 

More sustainable projects have followed with SME's local to Brighton with an international focus. 

Digital Health technologies are promising to have a profound effect on how health services are delivered, allowing people to manage their health more effectively, providing effective ways of diagnosing disease, monitoring the impact of policies on population health, resulting in improved accessibility, affordability, and quality of health care. Still, the introduction of these technologies comes with challenges and experience resistance and slow adaptation.

Theo’s specialising on Digital Nursing and Digital Health.

His research interests lie in the intersection of Health Care and Digital Technologies and his focus is on the field of co-producing and evaluating Digital Health Technologies through Digital Health Living Labs and accelerating innovation.

In particular, his research focuses on the following areas:

• Digital Health Living Labs. The work in this area is concerned with the development of Living Labs as ecosystems of open innovation through co-production with citizens.

• Evaluation of Digital Health Technologies. I am interested in developing new approaches and tools for the trialing and evaluating new technologies such as wearables and sensors and their use as health care tools.

• Digital Ready Healthcare Workforce. Based on the Digital Nursing term I coined in 2015, the aim of the work is to utilise the Living Labs as spaces for undergraduate and postgraduate health care students to work side by side with citizens on developing innovation skills and conduct research.

• IoT, Cyber-Physical, and Cloud Computing Security in Health Care. I am interested in exploring the role of the end-users as vulnerable actors in security attacks, threat discovery and response, and their educational requirements.        

Recent and ongoing projects include:

• EMPOWERCARE involving 13 cross border European partners. It is part of the Interreg VA 2Seas Mers Zeeën and has been awarded more than 4 million euros in funding by the European Regional Development Fund. The project involves partners coming together to co-create and test social innovations and digital health solutions to make local services more efficient and effective to address societal challenges in the 2Seas area.
• Digital Health Living Lab, initiated at Leach Court and expanded in more areas in Brighton. Living Labs offer an arena for developing and testing prototypes or more mature digital health products and services, through co-production with citizens, that have the potential to improve welfare services, reduce financial pressure to public sector services and to enable healthy living as a whole. The project was funded by the KSS AHSN Darzi Fellowships.
• the development of a Living Lab situated at The Bevy, aiming to explore and tackle social isolation and loneliness. The partnership will build on the experience of the Bevy in starting to tackle loneliness through different community initiatives and the university’s experience of the Brighton and Hove Digital Health Living Lab. It will enable the Living Lab to innovate from a domestic space – working with older people in sheltered accommodation – to also being located in a quintessentially British public space – the local pub. The project was funded by the UoB Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP)
• INNOVATEDIGNITY-ITN project led by Professor Kathleen Galvin where I am a member of the supervisory team. The purpose of INNOVATEDIGNITY-ITN funded by the European Commission (2019–2023) is to develop a shared research and training agenda in order to educate the next generation of interdisciplinary health care researchers and care leaders across Europe. The project is a response to the Europe wide need to provide sustainable and dignified care for older people at home and in residential, municipal and hospital settings.

I am Deputy Head of The School of Art at the University of Brighton where I founded and lead the pioneering MA Inclusive Arts Practice. I am Director of the learning-disabled Rocket Artists Studios. I have worked for many years with inclusive performance and visual arts alongside some of the world’s most socially excluded groups, in particular people with learning disabilities and elders. I often work internationally, training NGOs, cultural, health & education sector professionals. I have delivered inclusive arts projects for Tate Exchange, The National Gallery and The British Council in Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam and Nepal.

This work was recognised by winning The Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts 2017.

I'm interested in how particpatory arts practice can combat isolation, prejudice and exclusion by providing meeting points, public platforms and common experience for diverse groups of people.

I'm currently concerned with the following questions;

1. Can group movement work rapidly create understanding and closeness within a newly-acquainted group?
2. Can performative acts in the gallery increase our pleasure and understanding of the artworks by offering us time together to physically interact with the works?
3. What can moving together offer the practice of ‘expanded listening’ both between performers and beyond to the audience?
4. Can group actions of care within vulnerability be synonymous with strength and self-empowerment?
5. Can performing with ephemeral, sensuous material such as ice and ribbon rapidly create understanding and closeness within a newly-acquainted group?

 Research films and images for Alice Fox

Professor Kathleen Galvin is Professor of Nursing Practice. Her work has spanned phenomenology, philosophy, qualitative research, the arts and humanities in health, action research, multiple methods in service evaluation, public and patient involvement and perspectives, and issues in professional education.

As both a nurse and scholar Kathleen's theoretical work and current empirical research is grounded in a keen interest in philosophy and phenomenology. She aspires to contribute to fields concerned with how we can come to understand human experience in well-being and in vulnerability. Although this opens her to strong interdisciplinary influences, she is particularly interested in mining the breadth and depths of these explorations and research projects in order to bring back into nursing new insights for the meaning of care, relevant research methodologies, and epistemological frameworks that can enhance nursing practice, but also health and social care practice and education.

Her personal academic project concerns a contribution to philosophically informed theoretical insights and their import for the practice of caring. Her research work draws on humanities and the arts and she feels at home working in interdisciplinary contexts relevant to well-being, human experience and caring: In describing lived experiences and re-presenting them for the purposes of public and professional engagement empirically build upon a philosophically informed articulation of well-being and suffering. She aims to further develop ‘lifeworld led care’; further explore synergies and contributions to health related humanities and to practices in human services.

Kathleen wishes to continue to pursue all of these strands in order to further develop nursing theory, philosophy and research, with contributions to a distinctive development of person centred care: a framework for well-being, humanisation and suffering that can take account of a range of vulnerabilities in health and social care contexts.

My interests broadly relate to social and sustainable design - this includes design, craft and nature, regenerative and restorative design and making practices and circular economies. I have researched practice-based technology and making methods for participatory community planning and making in support of health and well-being.    

Designed products, spaces, services and systems pervade every part of our lives. The world is awash with ‘stuff’  - Design has ‘made it’. However in times of ecological crisis, environmental pollution, biodiversity collapse, social and political uncertainty and economic disparity design stands simultaneously as both disease and cure. 

I am interested in how designing and making contributes to positive, public persuasion, culture shift and design for change beyond delivering the next iteration of homogenous mobile phone. Design, craft and making have agency and are being engaged as tools and means to address issues of our time. Moreover design is about engagement – through potent, product propaganda, meaningful, material messaging and critical, craft campaigns, designers and makers are utilising the powerful language of materials, objects and products and the ubiquity of services and systems to change behaviour, provoke protest and empower people.

Creatives of diverse types are dispensing with disciplinary traditions and forming new alliances, helping rewild and regenerate habitats, promoting clean growth, creating tools for community activism and empowering more virtuous circular economies. Post disciplinary and inter-sectional methods see the rethinking of material manipulation, techno-crafting, distributed manufacturing and open-sourcing broadening inclusion and inviting more democratic pathways for creative change. Some of our most pressing issues have re-awakened design with the critical concern and purpose that once defined it and artists, designers and makers can turn these issues into opportunities for positive intervention and more ethical and sustainable development that integrates more symbiotically with our eco-system.

Fenia is the founder and the lead of the newly established Nutrition, Behaviour and Mental Health (NBMH) research group (https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/nutritionmentalhealthgroup/) that has 4 distinct research areas and themes: Nutrition and metabolism; Eating Disorders; Behaviour Change and Mindful Eating; and Lifestyle Interventions for Obesity and comorbidities. The group comprises by a multidisciplinary, diverse network of research experts in the field of Nutrition, Sport and Exercise Physiology, Clinical Physiology, Health and Applied Psychology.

My research interest lies on the effects that lifestyle interventions such as diet and exercise have on the health of the average individual and most importantly on clinical population such as obese, type 2 diabetic patients, peri- and post-menopausal women etc. 

The last five years, my research interest has also focused into the area of mental health. I have been conducting research investigating the effects that exercise and dietary interventions have on individuals with mental health problems such as severe mental illness patients and individuals that exhibit disordered eating behaviours or are clinically diagnosed with eating disorders.

At present, I am continuing my research on older women with a greater focus on the effects of high intensity interval exercise on exercise capacity, mood and congition. Recently, I have started investigating new, innovative strategies to promote health such as mindfulness and mindful eating and I am currently exploring the relationship between mindful eating and disordered eating (binge eating) and mood in university students and mentally ill patients. Moreover, I am in the process of exploring eating behaviour in a multidisciplinary approach, by integrating consuming behaviour, psychology of consumption and mindful eating. 

At the present moment, in collaboration with a research network of international experts in Europe and Australia, I am leading an international project on the investigation of the effects of  low energy availability (LEA) and relative energy deficiencty in sports (RED-S) in young adults and competitive and recreational athletes on mental health, eating behavior, body image, and metabolic and hormonal disregulations.

Finally, I am currently involved in the investigation of blood flow restriction on healthy and diseased populations as well as elite athletes.

 Current Research Projects

- The investigation of the effects of LEA and RED-S on the mental health, disordered eating behavior and metabolic/hormonal disregulations in young adults and competitive athletes.

- Blood flow restriction on health and diseased populations and elite athletes.

- The effects of high intensity interval exercise Vs continuous exercise on the exercise capacity, fat oxidation, mood and enjoyment of exercise in overweight peri- and post-menopausal women.

 - Eating Disorders in elite level athletes. 

 - The effects of disordered eating and poor mental health on mindful consumption of food in young adults. A multi-disciplinary collaborative research project between the University of Brighton,  Nottighnam Trent University and Conventry University.

 - Mindful eating and mood. An investigation of the relationship between mindless eating, binge eating behaviour and mood in sports science, health science and pharmacy and medical science students. A multi-disciplinary collaborative research project between the University of Brighton and Brighton and Sussex Medical School.

 - The association between work-related stress, eating behaviour and binge eating in academic staff in the UK. A multi-disciplinary collaborative research project between the University of Brighton and Brighton and Sussex Medical School.

Through her practice Charlotte Gould explores the potential for open interactive installations in digitally mediated public spaces and she has developed a number of artworks using urban screens. She is a visual communicator working with digital and tangible media, exploring audience participation, open interactivity, immersion, augmented reality and 360°environments. She has developed a number of mixed reality systems to prompt play and interaction across social and cultural boundaries. She examines audience agency, testing the boundaries of open interactive systems, to offer opportunity for diverse audiences to co-create artworks through the development of unique narratives. Through her research Charlotte tests the potential for mixed reality environments to promote public engagement, looking at how this can impact on culture, changing the way we engage in the urban environment and contribute to a collective memory and sense of place. She has developed 360° mixed reality video installations which engage participants through non-linear narrative with issues such as sustainabilty and health and well being. Charlotte has exhibited her work internationally including in China, Australia with Urban Picnic and Peoples Screen and in Europe at MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona) where she had a three-month residency and exhibition (2011). She has delivered papers for international conferences with peer reviewed proceedings, journals and book chapters. 

Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson's research is interdisciplinary, focusing across early modern English literature and cultural history and their afterlives in 20th and 21st century contexts. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a current AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellow. Her work focuses on literary histories, especially Shakespeare in performance and cultural contexts, performance and gender, literary commemoration, heritage and cultural memory, and early modern women’s writing and its afterlives and mediation. She is widely published on the afterlives of early modern texts, images and ideologies, Shakespeare in cultural memory; histories of Shakespeare and the First World War; appropriations of Shakespeare for counter-cultural expression, such as in the women's suffrage movement; early modern mothers’ legacies and the idea of posthumous writing.

Her most recent major project uncovered the full history of the Shakespeare Hut, a First World War building for New Zealand ANZACS on leave in London that contained a purpose-built theatre and was created to mark Shakespeare's tercentary in 1916. She is currently PI for a major research project, in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, focusing on Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna and her home, Hall's Croft, and the mediation of early modern women in heritage presentation, public engagements with history and cultural memory.

Dr Grant Ferguson is Co-Director of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories and leads the Performance and Communities Research and Enterprise Group.

My research and consultancy have centred around a practice based, design thinking approach, applied to real world contexts, alongside developing new methods for co-designing with others.

I emerged from a background in 3D disciplines, studying physics and product design, later becoming involved in digital and interaction design for websites and Apps. I am therefore interested in designing experiences across different dimensions and disciplines, particularly where they are applied to social innovation. My approach has evolved over time, from a human centred (UX) perspective which emphasises the individual and their immediate networks, towards a wider, systemic viewpoint that also considers the impact of solutions on supply chains, society, and the natural world.

My work has had a specific focus (location-based games) but I also have wider interests based on the methodologies I have adopted.

Specific Themes:

I have been investigating educational location-based games and their motivational properties to encourage outdoor play for young people. I am interested in how they can support conditions that lead to an ‘ideal experience’ using flow theory, originally proposed by Czikszentmihalyi and I have created my own model of flow for this genre.  Projects include:

• Outdoor trail with Develop Outdoors, a local CIC who work with vulnerable teenagers on outdoor play for wellbeing.
• Games in woodlands for Forestry England to encourage a connection with natural environments and science for school curriculum.
• Co-designing games with local schools, Sussex Wildlife Trust and University of Sussex

Wider Interests:

I am interested in applying design thinking, including co-design methods and circular economy approaches to innovation. I also follow a methodology that ensures design research is rigorous, based on a model adapted from Elizabeth Sanders work, that ensures stakeholders’ requirements are considered from a range of perspectives, including their emotional and latent needs. Typical projects included:

• As an associate researcher with Always Possible, a local business innovation company who work with charities and SME’s I helped to create new directions for their clients, using co-design and evidence-based approaches.
• Lead academic for a KTP with PDD Ltd., a leading design consultancy working on a research model for understanding user and contextual requirements. Experience mapping techniques and other techniques I introduced supported rigour for client investigations.
• New methods developed for working with young people applied to global design projects, for example, working with Gambian Projects Overseas and Gambian Medical Services on innovations for primary schools. We were considering circular economy approaches to building and food services.
• Supporting a Nominet sponsored project to engage young people with town planning and community engagement, applying methods of working with young people I developed. This was a project initiated by Nick Gant as part of the Community 21 programme at the University.

Supervisory Interests and Research

My research uses diverse methodologies including grounded theory, phenomenology, phenomenography, critical theory, and post-approaches. I focus on exploring individuals' experiences in providing and seeking care, aiming to develop conceptual understanding and think with theory to offer critical insights into clinical practice. My clinical specialisation lies in musculoskeletal (MSK) care, leading me to supervise research related to MSK care and persistent pain. Additionally, I am interested in research at the intersection of art and science and co-lead the Posthuman Walking Project.

In my research journey, I have delved into conceptual investigations of abstract concepts such as the therapeutic alliance, person-centeredness, and holistic care. Moreover, I am actively involved in qualitative research within broader healthcare contexts. For instance, I am currently supervising PhD researchers employing phenomenological methodology to explore living with breast cancer and perinatal well-being.

My research expertise also extends to quantitative methodologies. My doctoral work, completed in 2014, focused on the effects of mobilization treatment, encompassing reliability and validity studies and and a randomised controlled trial.

Scholarly biography

Aside from my research endeavours, I hold significant roles within academic and ethical committees. As the Chair of the School of Sport and Health Sciences Research Ethics and Integrity Committee, I contribute to upholding ethical standards. I also sit on the Cross School Ethics Committee and the School Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee, further engaging in scholarly governance.

My academic journey began with a BSc (Hons) in Physiotherapy in 1994, followed by clinical experiences in the NHS and private practice. Transitioning to academia in 2000, I combined full-time academic roles with part-time clinical practice. Over the years, I have actively contributed to the field, becoming a full member of the Musculoskeletal Association of Chartered Physiotherapists (MACP) in 1999 and holding various executive positions within MACP, including Chair.

Currently serving as a Principal Lecturer and course leader for the MSc Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy program for 15 years, I possess extensive experience in course and module leadership, development, and review. Additionally, I contribute to the scholarly community as an experienced external examiner and reviewer for reputable journals. As a founding member of the School Specialist Interest Group for Phenomenology and the international Critical Physiotherapy Network, I am dedicated to advancing innovative and ethical research practices in healthcare.

Approach to teaching

As an educator, I adopt an intellectually diverse approach that draws from philosophical and sociological perspectives. I integrate humanism, critical pedagogy, critical theory, and postmodernism into my teaching  to create a rich learning environment. This approach allows me to blend discussions on causation, power, equity, and stigma seamlessly with traditional physiotherapy topics such as education, exercise, and manual therapies.

One of my primary goals is to encourage students to engage in critical reflection on key concepts and frameworks, such as person-centred care, evidence-based practice, and clinical guidelines. By doing so, I aim to cultivate a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between social constructs, individual experiences, and healthcare practices.

Central to my teaching philosophy is the promotion of critical consciousness and epistemic humility among students. I challenge them to question established norms and paradigms, encouraging them to think differently about their experiences, ideas, and professional practices. Through this process, students develop a more nuanced and empathetic approach to care.

I employ various methods to facilitate collective learning experiences, including facilitated group discussions, collaborative group work, role-playing scenarios, and practical hands-on sessions. Additionally, I incorporate creative and reflective learning activities to foster a sense of wonder and promote empathic understanding.

By intertwining philosophical and sociological insights with practical physiotherapy skills, I aim for students to become thoughtful, compassionate, and critically engaged healthcare professionals.

Elona came to the UK in 2005 to study her undergraduate degree in Human Sciences at the University of Sussex. This grounded her interdisciplinary education firmly across humanities, social and biological sciences.

Working as a Research Fellow at the University of Brighton, Elona developed research expertise in working across disciplinary and knowledge boundaries, examining critical social issues and questions of social solidarity and responsibility. In this role, she developed and co-led research projects with national and international community partners, led consultancy projects on community involvement and values-based approaches evaluation, worked to integrate concepts of sustainability within the UK higher education institutions and facilitated learning with undergraduate and postgraduate students.

In 2015-16 she was a Visiting Fellow at Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

In addition to her academic work, she has also participated in local projects such as the Save the UBC Farm campaign, Community Eats project at UBC, University of Brighton Food Co-op, the Brighton and Sussex Universities Food Network, and served as a member of the board at the Brighton Peace and Environment Centre. Since completing her PhD she has contributed to setting up a transition urbanism project in south-west France.

After completing her doctorate on urban commoning projects in Europe, focusing on practices in London and Paris she took maternity leave. She is now an ESRC postdoctoral fellow funded through the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership.

Helen Johnson is a Principal Lecturer in Psychology and Co-Director of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, working at the intersection of critical social science, community psychology and arts-based/led inquiry.  She researches in 3 related fields: (i) innovative, arts-based research, with a particular focus on participatory poetic inquiry (ii) applications of the arts to support individual/community health and wellbeing and (iii) spoken word communities and practices. 

Helen is a social scientist with a background in Psychology and Sociology, and a spoken word artist with over 20 years' performing experience.  Her ground-breaking, cutting edge research is united by an interest in the arts, particularly spoken word and creative writing, as transformative means through which to enhance individual and community wellbeing, build critical resilience and transform the ways in which academics work with and for communities, particularly amongst those groups who are marginalized and excluded within wider society.  Helen is the founder of the 'collaborative poetics' method and network, which use participatory, arts-based research to explore/communicate the lived experiences of communities and individuals, and support the development of critical resilience.  She is Co-Director and Creative Methodologies lead for the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, facilitator of the PGR Creative Methodologies Group, and an active member of the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice.   

Helen has received funding for her research from the Independent Social Research Foundation, National Centre for Research Methods and National Institute for Health Research, as well as undertaking numerous consultancy contracts with community organisations/groups, local Government and charities.  Her research has received international recognition, and she has set up productive working relations with scholars and artists across Canada (e.g. at McGill and Concordia Universities) and the U.S. (eg. at Louisiana State University).

Her current research includes:

• Applying and refining the participatory, arts-based research method of  'collaborative poetics'
• Developing an international research network for everyday creativity
• Developing a model and resources for community-engaged research, underpinned by everyday creativity principles, working in collaboration with Nicole Monney and the Trust for Developing Cmmunities

Helen is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College.

Dr. Catherine Kelly is a geographer with research interests in sustainability, tourism and wellbeing. Her lecturing, research and practices cross a range of these broad categories. Catherine's research areas have varied over her academic career - starting with rural geography, then moving into the field of heritage studies and then tourism (cultural, heritage, wellness and sustainable tourism specifically); with a more recent emphasis on the importance of 'blue spaces' for human wellbeing. She is interested in the importance of water-based 'therapeutic landscapes' for physical, psychological and social wellbeing. Catherine's research also looks at how wellbeing can be used to advocate for personal relationships with the coast and its stewardship/environmental conservation. She is interested in access to the sea - in physical, social and cultural terms. Since joining the School of Business and Law, Catherine is also interested in the role of the Blue Economy in tourism development and sustainable business practices.

Catherine's work on Blue Spaces has received widespread media attention resulting in interviews for the BBC, Guardian newspaper, Independent, and a range of high circulation magazines and podcasts. She is a regular invited speaker at public events and festivals in the UK and overseas. She sits on the newly created UK national Blue Space Forum for the Environment Agency.

Jayne Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader of MA Inclusive Arts Practice. She is an artist and researcher who works across sculpture, drawing and performance in her own arts practice and in the development and realisation of inclusive arts projects.

Jayne’s research and practice is situated at the intersection between inclusive arts and art made for exhibition. She is interested in the role of arts-based research in developing, understanding and evidencing the role of arts practices in a range of settings. Her research interests focus on the role arts and artists can play in the lives of older people, people living with dementia and those living with other disabilities. She has explored the interventions and dialogues that can be created between arts activities, practices and materials and everyday and health and social care environments. During her practice-based PhD she developed multi-sensory activities and environments that combined everyday and arts practices to engage those living and working in residential care settings and to question and shift experiences of institutional care.

Jayne has published articles and book chapters about her research that contribute to the rethinking of negative understandings of walking undertaken by people living with dementia, the role of objects in supporting and communicating a sense of self, and the conceptualisation of performances of everyday activities in arts sessions as a form of inter-relational self-care.

Johanna Love is an artist, academic and researcher living in London, UK. In 2022 she became Scienitifc Associate at the Natural History Museum, London. She is interested in making images that operate at the limits of human perception and often invoke ideas of the technological sublime, through print, drawing and photographic languages, often combining all together, using landscape and architectural subject matter, to generate unstable, shifting material surfaces, and visually complex and unfathomable images. Here, the fractured, open and complex images offer an arena within which we can contemplate themes of time, memory and mortality. 

In 2013 she attained a PhD in the field of Fine Art at Chelsea college of Arts, with a thesis titled Dust: Exploring new ways of viewing the photographic printed image. Previous to this, she completed a fellowship in Printmaking at The Royal Academy Schools between 2001-5. She exhibits nationally and internationally; continues to contribute to key debates through exhibitions and international conferences and symposiums across fine art printmaking, drawing and photography contexts.

Over the last few years Johanna has been working in collaboration with senior scientists at Natural History Museum, London and the Interplanetary Sciences Archive at UCL. At the Natural History Museum Johanna works with Electronmicroscopy to examine samples of dust collected from her families old home in the centre of Hamburg, Germany. The house sits in the centre of Hamburg and withstood the intense bombing of WW2. Johanna's interests are in the dust as an archive of time and place; of history and memory; and also of the discord between the scientific image and human perception. She is currently making large-scale drawings to re-think and re- negotiate the scientific image and generate new readings of time, scale and weight.

Lynch's developing research interests in experiential time, photography and the role of the image in architectural design led her to completing a fully funded PhD at the University of Brighton, where she has been lecturing in Architecture at both masters and undergraduate level. 

Titled The Dark Mirror: Engaging Multiple Temporalities Through Drawing, Lynch's doctoral thesis investigates the temporal relationship of experimental methods in both architectural drawing and making, focusing on the role of the unknown in the creative process. Her findings are fundamentally connected to the process of learning and this is expressed though her position as a studio leader. She has been involved in architectural education since 2012 and her active interest in learning is central to her role as an academic researcher. As the vehicle for her research often manifests in drawn and built works, she regularly exhibits in the UK and abroad.

Drawing pervades the activities of the art school but there are many other contexts in which drawing takes place, supporting explanation, communication, expression and thought. Philippa's main research interest is in drawing practices, particularly in applied settings where drawing impacts on health and wellbeing, within art and design education, and in research. She leads the drawing theme in the Centre of Research Excellence in Arts and Wellbeing.

In recent years she has researched and published on the manual drawing that takes place in clinical contexts, on the concepts of 'touch' and 'presence' in drawing, on the impact of drawing as a tool in cross-disciplinary learning and the uses of drawing within visual research methodologies. Philippa's work on clinical drawing with Martha Turland has been published in Medical Humanities Journal and she has an open access paper in which she explored some of the problematics of visual representation within clinical communication (Lyon, P. (2016). Visualising and communicating illness experiences:drawing, the doctor-patient relationship and arts-health research).

Philippa has an interest in the use of drawing within research and in developing a greater understanding of its potential and the limitations as a type of visual research method. What kind of 'data' can drawing produce? What might the appropriate uses of this method be? A chapter in the second edition of the Sage Handbook of Visual Methods, edited by Luc Pauwels and Dawn Mannay, explores this.

Drawing is to some extent fraught with notions of legitimacy and skill, with who can and can't draw. Whilst celebrating and investigating the value of various types of specialist and highly skilled drawing, Philippa also believes in the importance of seeing drawing as a wide spectrum of practices, many of which are open and inclusive, which we all have the right to take part in, and which bring benefits to many. The desert island drawing project is a collection of filmed selections of drawings from a range of contributors, with accompnaying personal narratives about why drawing matters.

Philippa is also interested in curation, both in terms of its importance as a skill for art and craft students, and as a method through which practice-based research data can be analysed, selected and communicated. She has been involved in exhibition selection panels and in curating and organising a number of exhibitions, including two that reappraised the work and impact of the artist and designer MacDonald Gill (2011, 2013), one looking at the role of art in considering environmental change (at ONCA Gallery, 2015 with D. Bullen, L. Coleman and A. Clayton), two cross-disciplinary drawing exhibitions at the University of Brighton (Utility of the Line in 2014 with M. Turland; Marks Make Meaning in 2015 with D. Bullen) and other internal exhibitions for taught and research postgraduates and colleagues. With D. Bullen and J. Fox she curated an exhibition in Norway in 2019, as part of the Touching the World Lightly project. 

Vanessa Marr is Principal Lecturer and Course Leader for BA Design for Digital Media, based at the University of Brighton's City campus. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts. Her leadership responsibilities include roles as the Academic Lead for Learning & Teaching and the Academic Lead for Research Mentoring in the School of Art and Media. She sits on the school ATHENA SWAN Equality and Diversity Committee, the School Quality and Standards Committee (SQSC) and is Deputy Chair for School Education and Student Experience Committee (SESEC). She has also been an active member of the school Ethics Panel and was previously Academic Lead for Employability. 

With a professional background in graphic design, she has extensive industry experience within both marketing and publishing environments, creating and directing work for both print and moving image. She worked as an Art Editor for Dorling Kindersley and also ran her own design agency for over 10 years.

Her academic work is practice-based, creative and autoethnographic. Vanessa takes a critical view of the language of common-place domestic objects and popular narratives, in particular fairy tales, which she explores through embroidery, creative writing and drawing. Her research is underpinned by visual design-theory and process whilst embracing an intuitive and practice-based approach that facilitates self-authorship and her continuing exploration of narrative and sequence.

In 2015 Vanessa founded and continue to lead the award-winning Domestic Dusters collaborative research project, which invites women to embroider their domestic experiences upon a duster. It is regularly exhibited, transforming the duster from a cloth kept under the sink into a powerful collection of voices. The growing collection includes almost 1000 individual contributions, received from across the world. It has been exhibited in galleries such as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft, at universities including Loughborough, Bedford, Brighton, and St Andrews, and in libraries and other public community spaces. It has also been presented exhibited and internationally, in both Europe and the US. As part of this project, Vanessa has also received Impact Acceleration Account funding to collaborate with community partners and empower whose domestic situations are compromised. This has included inviting unpaid carers to embroider their caring experiences onto duster, which were displayed and presented to politicians at the Senedd in 2023, calling for improved rights. 

Vanessa publishes widely on feminist concerns including invisible domestic and caring labour, the relationship between motherhood and academia, creative research methods, and the role of stitching as a socially engaged, craftivist practice. She is also completing a PhD with the University of Brighton entitled: Enticing and enacting visual domestic narratives by drawing with thread upon a duster: An autoethnographic study.

I have been employed at the University of Brighton as an occupational therapy tutor for 20 years.  During this time I have had the opportunity to develop from a clinical practitioner working in mental health into a confident and competent occupational therapy educator. 

In 2020 I successfully completed my part-time Doctoral research journey in recognition of a programme of work entitled 'Exploring the potential of embroidering as a therapeutic intervention in occupational therapy.  My research interests encompass the use of everyday occupations within a transitional process  to influence health and well-being.

My overall area of research consists of an exploration of the politics of spatial design. Growing up in New Zealand I became aware of the legacy of ‘Settler Colonialism’ and its consequences and effects on inhabited space. In recent years, work in Israel/Palestine has reinforced this interest and led to a current focus on the politics of domestic space. In particular, my research examines the way colonial conflicts enter into the domestic world through disputes over settlements and houses and through a variety of punitive measures, including home invasion, displacement, house demolition and exclusion.

Two parallel studies drive this research. The first explores narratives that unfold in specific places and the way these may be used to negotiate domestic spatial environments. Narrative may be considered to be an inherited capability forming individual and communal histories particular to the experience of a place. The second investigation is conducted through drawing, which has played a part in exploring the way issues of security, (walls, barriers and borders), have contributed to particular shaping of domestic space. From my background in architecture, fine art and engineering, these research strands have informed both teaching and on-going research activity.

"At a fast changing time for illustration as a discipline, the recognition of change and the need to anticipate further developments has become paramount for educators."

Roderick Mills ICON10 The Illustration Conference Detroit USA 2018

Roderick is the Course Leader for Illustration at the University of Brighton, his practice intersects both the commercial world of illustration, with a recognised portfolio of international clients across most areas of the industry, and self-authored projects that reflect the changing nature of the discipline, including being an award winning film-maker. Roderick is at the centre of the developing research culture internationally of illustration as subject as it moves beyond notions of traditional print usage, and the growing critical study of illustration. 

Roderick sat on the Board of Directors at the Association of Illustrators for 9 years, is a member of the Illustration Educators network, and sits on various peer review panels, scientific committees for international conferences on illustration and animation. Co-founded MOKITA Illustration Forum, is a member of the Advisory Board for the Journal of Illustration, and is an invited jury member for a number of International Illustration competitions. He writes and comments on illustration both for magazines and academic papers, and contributed a chapter for the Wiley Blackwell published book ‘A Companion to Illustration: Art and Theory'.

Research interests includes the emerging areas of illustration as an expanded field of practice including moving image, animation, situated illustration, drawing, storytelling, and performative aspects of illustration including the educational use of workshops, for both social and public engagement. Personally in his work Roderick explores narrative, loops, sequences, pectoral space, and time travel.

My research focuses on Creative Writing pedagogy, offering ideas for supporting students' confidence with writing and engaging them with community projects including working with archives, interviewing people in care homes and workshops promoting diversity in education and writing. I have published extensively on autoethnography and collaborative autoethnography, working with survivors of domestic abuse, artists and with academics from other disciplines including fine art, film, media and education. I am a member of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing and the Research Enterprise Group - Performance and Communities.

Although my research interests centre on the field of mobilities, this is a broad area of research that incorporates many diverse topics. I have four main areas of interest within his field. Firstly, recent work has focused on intergenerational and gendered mobilities and gender-based violence. Secondly, I have worked for a number of years on mobilities and transport and the ways in which transport intersects with other social issues. Thirdly, my research seeks to understand the significance of urban physical spaces as sites of social interactions and design. Lastly, I continue to pursue new ways of carrying out research through creative research methodologies and methods. 

I am interested in developing participatory creative and sensory methodologies for investigating issues of social, spatial and mobile justice. My doctoral research focused on using listening methods to investigate gentrification and displacement, but I have previously undertaken research into homelessness and the community/voluntary sector. Within gentrification, I am interested in the full spectrum of im/mobilities encompassed by gentrification-induced-displacement, bringing a mobilities lens to understand the processes of un-homing and loss of a sense of place. 

I am predominantly interested in listening and sound methods. I have developed a an innovative toolbox under the umbrella term of participatory listening research. I draw on sound studies for social inquiry underpinned by a participatory ethos. My doctoral project explored how listening practices can elicit people’s changing relationships to place. I am working with a local community music organisation to learn and share how listening activities and sound walks can be used as a tool for both research, community engagement and wellbeing purposes. This also furthers my interest in understanding how universities can work with local communities for mutual benefit. 

Jeremy Radvan is an academic and a teacher of drawing and visual communication. He comes from a background in illustration with a particular interest in drawing and animation. He has taught in a number of institutions and at a wide range of levels for 25 years.

His research comes out of an abiding interest in drawing. 

My research interests are focused on extended reality (XR), through immersive room-based, screen-based, or city-wide mobile media. My work is designed to tell stories about imagined, forgotten, or unremembered others. 

I have a transdisciplinary practice which investigates and combines areas of British colonial history, archival data, computer science, digital geographies, and digital humanities.  The focus of the work is on the interplay between spatial memory and physical space in the built environment as an intersectional backdrop to examine contemporary, retro, and historical stories.

Methodologies I use in my practice intersect across practical and theoretical frames such as computer vision, human-to-computer interaction, human-to-human looking, and by extension machines that see.

These methods are highly experimental using media which consists in combination of;

• Photographs
• Moving Image
• Augmented reality
• Virtual reality 
• Data
• Conversational chatbots
• Frontend programming (HTML CSS JavaScript React)

Research Interests:

Jem Ryan is a maker who is concerned with memory, making and meaning. With a particular interest in mnemonic objects and spaces, things we think with and the semantic nature of objects, his research informs both his practice and his teaching.

His recent practice centers around notions of witnessing, testimony and memory. The premise of the work is a fascination with the sworn oath of testimony declaring how a witness will tell ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ and the inevitable inaccuracies of the resulting testimony. When witnessing significant moments in time, witnesses will experience or perceive multiple perspectives resulting the construction of multiple memory narratives or  ‘factions’.

The work begins with an interest in the fallibility of memory and attempts to explore ways of capturing moments in time drawing on multiple information sources. The product of this thinking are three dimensional eventscapes which reference specific moments in time and attempt to act as instruments of measure providing what Bertillon refers to as a ‘God’s eye view’. The resulting work might be considered as both a three dimensional and temporal cartography of moments in time.

Previously his work has explored themes of personal spaces and contemporary reliquaries for ephemera. He has worked to commission producing both furniture and sculpture in wood and metal.

He currently developing work exploring the themes of memorial, commemoration and reenactment objects which build on these research interests and fulfil mnemonic functions.

Professor Santin's research interests are in the field of Regenerative Medicine.

He has been involved in many research projects with a focus ranging from bone and cartilage regeneration, cardiovascular devices, control of angiogenesis to inhibit it in cartilage regeneration and stimulating it in ischaemia and neurodegenerative diseases. Prof Santin's multidisciplinary research group has been developing natural biomaterials (for example, soybean-based biomaterials) and synthetic biomimetic nano-structured biomaterials (such as, hyperbranched polymers) able to control tissue regeneration as well as establishing in vitro clinically-reflective models for the testing of biomaterials, drugs and tissue engineering constructs. Through the use of these biomaterials as substrates for cell culturing, he has been able to unveil the mechanisms of formation of stem cell spheroids and to develop organoids for the testing of drugs and nanomedicines.

Since the early nineteen-nineties my work in the field of telematic arts explores the emergence of user-determined narratives between remote participants who are brought together within shared telepresent environments. Through the use of live chroma-keying, video projection and videoconference technology these geographically divided audience participants are composited live in intimate social spaces. This is essentially how all my installation projects function, where the public participant plays an integral part within these telematic experiments, whose engagement within them makes the 'Work' and their shared experiences of them creates the 'Art'. As an artist I am both designer of the environment and instigator of the narrative, which I determine through the social and political context that I choose to play out these telematic encounters.

"Sermon aims at expanding the senses of the user, while it is obvious that the other cannot really be touched but that only swift, decisive, possibly tenderly reactive movements can experience the suggestion of touch - a moment of contemplation, as many users observed. The synaesthetical, sensual impression lets the hand and the eye fuse, and it is this effect that characterizes his work." Oliver Grau, Media Art Net

I am currently Director of the Centre for Transforming Sexuality & Gender (CTSG) which brings together undergraduates, postgraduates, doctoral and post-doctoral students as well as early career researchers, visiting researchers and senior professors, to focus on issues relating to sexuality, gender, and social change. If you are interested in joining the Centre, please contact us:  ctsg@brighton.ac.uk

My research interests are driven strongly by a social justice agenda, along with a desire for research to be collaborative and participatory with demonstrative social impact which ultimately tackles disadvantage and inequalities in health.

I am interested in all areas of research relating to public health and health promotion theory, policy, and practice, especially with an international/global focus. Areas of specific interest and expertise relate to three key areas:

1. Sexual health, sexual orientation, and gender identity
2. Mental and physical health inequalities
3. Parenting (including fatherhood, breastfeeding, and young parents).

Current research projects:

• ESCC Research Collaboration Hub (RCH)
• GambLGBTQ+: Understanding Gambling in LGBTQ+ communities
• AHRC Coastal Community & Creative Health (3CH)
• SBRI Healthcare: Creation of a Recipe Book for sustainable ICU
• NIHR - Investigating the role of Theatre-in-Education in preventing illicit substance use
• WHO Policy Brief in Health Promotion
• Health Counts 2024: A city wide health survey of Brighton & Hove
• WHO ProSPeRero: Project on Sexually Transmitted Infection Point-of-care Testin - Clinic based evaluation of SD BIOLINE HIV/Syphilis Duo (Alere) and DPP® HIV-Syphilis Assay (Chembio) for the screening of HIV and syphilis in men who have sex with men in the STI screening facilities of Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom (UK).

Previous research projects:

European/International:

• Council of Europe - LGBTQI+ Access to Healthcare
• WHO CV-19: Health systems analysis and evaluations of the barriers to availability, utilization and readiness of sexual and reproductive health services in COVID-19 affected areas.
• ESTICOM: European Surveys & Trainings to Improve MSM Community Health project. European Commission. Lead for WP6 (ECHOES Survey).
• Health4LGBTI: reducing health inequalities experienced by LGBTI people. European Commission. Lead for WP1 & WP2

• HEPCOM:Preventing obesity among children and young people.
• Everywhere in Japan: HIV prevention for Men who have Sex with Men
• SIALON II: Capacity building in combining targeted prevention with meaningful HIV surveillance among men who have sex with men
• SODEMIFA: Addressing the social determinants of health: Multilevel governance of policies aimed at families with children
• DAIWA: A feasibility study to explore the European Everywhere framework in Japan
• ACTION-FOR-HEALTH: Reducing health inequalities - preparation for action plans and structural funds projects
• GRADIENT: Tackling the Gradient - applying public health policies to effectively reduce health inequalities amongst families and children
• H-CUBE: HBV-HCV-HIV- Three different and serious threats for European young people. A network to study and face these challenges in the EU
• EVERYWHERE Project: A European multi-sectoral network for the prevention of HIV/AIDS for men having sex with men
• TEP: Health Promotion International – Transatlantic Exchange Partnership: EU-Canada
• ECHIM European Community Health Indicator Monitoring Project
• CEIHPAL Canadian-European Initiative for Health Promotion Advanced Learning: EU-Canada
• PHETICE: Public Health Education and Training in an Enlarging Europe
• DETERMINE: EU Consortium for action on the socio-economic determinants of Health
• ENGENDER: Inventory of good practices in Europe for promoting gender equity in health

Local/national:

• LGBTQ+ People and Gambling Harms: Scoping Study
• Investigating the impact of Covid-19 on local communities within East Sussex.
• A review of alcohol use amongst gender and sexual minorities
• CEPN: East Sussex Learning Together Community Education Provider Network
• Best Practice in Corporate Occupational Health
• Diabetes UK Community Champions Project Evaluation (DUKCC).
• Exploring a whole-system intervention to improve mental health and wellbeing in schools.
• Evaluation of Care Navigation as part of the Right Person First initiative (CANE - Care Navigation Evaluation).
• FuelPre (Fuel Poverty Reduction Evaluation). Evaluation of the NHS Hastings & Rother Clinical Commissioning Group Healthy Homes Programme.
• Peas Please Veg City project. Listening First: ‘Veg on a Budget’Evaluation of the Education, Training, Volunteering & Employment (ETVE) Project for People Living with HIV (PLWHIV).
• Older people living with HIV in residential care homes. Extension to the Education, Training, Volunteering & Employment (ETVE) project.
• A better understanding what makes for effective conversations about alcohol between parents & their 15-17 year olds. Drinkware.
• Healthy Hastings & Rother Programme: Developing an evaluation methodology. Hastings & Rother CCG.
• Engaging fathers to support breastfeeding
• Engagement with young people to inform health improvement commissioning for children, families and schools in East Sussex
• Analysis of the Better Beginnings consultation in East Sussex
• Engaging and supporting fathers to promote breastfeeding: A concept analysis
• An evaluation of services for young people in East Sussex: FE nurse provision at schools and colleges, pulse innov8, and the young men’s health worker service
• The perspectives of fathers on the development of a breastfeeding support pack
• Understanding the service needs of routine and manual smokers working on building sites in Tower Hamlets
• Fathers’ views on breastfeeding in Brighton and Hove
• The Sussex LGBTU Training and Development Research Partnership
• The West Sussex LGBTU Youth Research Project and LGBTU Launch Event
• Review of Brighton and Hove WHO Phase IV Healthy City Programme
• The effectiveness of an innovative digital-Story intervention aimed at reducing binge drinking among young people
• Evaluation of fpa’s ‘Speakeasy’ course for parents
• Supporting young fathers: examples of promising practice
• Promoting health and emotional wellbeing: accredited training for supported housing staff working with young people
• Communication and supervision about alcohol in families
• Determinants of sport and physical activity amongst young women: a secondary analysis
• Evaluation of the community sport and enhanced PESSCL pilot programme,
• Speakeasy parenting fund evaluation: supporting professionals working with young people around sex and relationships

Rafaella Siagkri is a Lecturer in Interior Architecture. Rafaella's research interests span across interdisciplinary aspects exploring the symbiotic relationship between architecture and cinema through the application of Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Her PhD focuses on the restoration and renovation of architectural expressionist film sets, which have played a significant role in the history of both cinema and architecture, using The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) as the main case study. Rafaella's study explores the utilisation of VR as a tool for understanding abstract architecture and it advocates its use for the preservation of cultural heritage within the realm of both arts. 

I am currently a Research Fellow on the GambLGBTQ+ project working with co-PI's Dr Laetitia Zeeman and Dr Alex Sawyer. GambLGBTQ+ is a study aiming to understand gambling in LGBTQ+ Communities. It is a collaboration between researchers at the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (CTSG) and the School of Education, Sport and Health Sciences, University of Brighton, LGBT Switchboard Brighton and Hove, and YouGov. It is a mixed methods project which includes conducting a survey to understand the prevalence of gambling and gambling harms amongst LGBTQ+ communities for the first time in Great Britain. Interviews, online diaries and photovoice are all used to gain a more in-depth understanding of the harms, barriers to support, protective factors, and actions those with lived experience would like to see.

I have recently been awarded a R&KE Development Fund grant to conduct research with local charity The Clare Project into the experiences of cycling for trans* individuals. The very small amount of existing research on LGBTQ+ experiences of cyling highlight it's use for mutual aid, it's liberating potential, and joyfulness, alongside the multiple barriers. This project will hold group discussions and produce a digital zine to increase our understanding of the benefits to health and wellbeing and inform approaches to ensure a greater diversity of residents participate in active travel.

The PhD project I recently completed (January 2024) concerns researching trans and non-binary embodied experiences of city space and the implications for urban planning theory and practice. How does contemporary English local planning practice incorporate gender into policy and practice? Can planning be inclusive of trans and non-binary residents?

I utilised creative mapping methods to explore trans and non-binary embodiment and spatialities, alongside discourse analysis and stakeholder interviews to understand local planning practice. In the thesis an infrastructural approach to trans life is developed in relation to the policy domains of mobility, housing, and green spaces. Trans infrastructures are conceptualised as the collective dependencies and spatialised flows of care that enable and constrain trans lives. Trans infrastructures is conceived as a bridging concept between lived experiences, embodied knowledges, and the discipline of planning. An expansive infrastructural lens provides a conceptual guide for planners and associated practitioners, but crucially and more radically a conceptual platform from which trans people can better throw bricks.

It is available here: Trans Infrastructures

My research interests are contemporary urban governance and the role of spatial policy within this; the geographies of gender and sexuality; mobilities; the epistemics of British planning and it's relationship to colonialism; how queer and transfeminist political praxis can ameliorate and transform the inequalities LGBTQ+ communities face.

Dr Maria Sourbati is the research lead for ‘Smart Infrastructure: Cities, Travel, Energy and Housing’ at the Centre for Digital Media Cultures. Sourbati's current research explores social implications of emerging technologies with a focus on mobility, age and data.

Maria has developed expertise in communications and social policy, new media and older people, digital media, smart mobility, and age relations. Maria's current research examines digital data, smart mobility and age relations as part of complex sets of relations of power that shape a person’s experience and social inclusion along time and other social markers of difference, including gender, race and class.

Her research has also examined tensions inherent in policy-driven diffusion of digital technologies and locally situated modes of engagement with ICTs. This strand investigates the politics of the digital switchover and user aspects in the 'digital by default' policy agenda from a social inclusion perspective. Maria’s earlier work on historically and technologically situated processes of media regulation has examined public service provision in electronic communications with a focus on diversity, universal access and media literacy.

The immediate climatic threats ask for radical thought and action. Current practices of building design and construction are not adapting sufficiently to fight the imminent dangers of the status quo. Sarah is interested in exploring radical dynamic architectures which might start to suggest the prospect of alternative sustainable futures. Her PhD in architecture, funded by Arup, explored the evolution and user experience of responsive architecture, focusing on kinetic facades. Sarah collaborates on this work with Dr Hugo Mulder from the University of Southern Denmark. Hugo is a designer, engineer and researcher in building dynamics and was previously a specialist engineer in movable structures at Arup. 

Her pedagogic research rotates around a concern for student experience within the design studio, with previous work exploring the critique and graduate engagement. 

I am a principal lecturer in physiotherapy in the School of Education, Sport and Health Sciences. My research interests span the neurological and rehabilitation fields. I hold a specific interest in caring practice in physiotherapy and rehabilitation, stroke, stroke rehabilitation, qualitative and creative methods, and in particular, hermeneutic phenomenology. 

My research is situated in the wide-ranging field of cybernetics, with focuses on its relations with architecture and systemic design, including historical connections and contemporary relevances.

For me, cybernetics is a form of recursive thinking and acting for exploring connections between multiple contexts (including living systems, organisations, technologies, and practical activities such as designing, researching, and conversation) and for navigating self-references (e.g. the design of design, the context of a context, etc.). Through my work, I am attempting to recover aspects of cybernetics' perculiar forms of transdisciplinarity and the possibilities it provides for articulating some of the paradoxical dilemmas that arise in design, to situate these historically, and to make them available in the context of contemporary design challenges.

My current research interests centre upon how our physical experience of the world co-incides with our cultural, social and political relationship to designed objects. What can be described as 'design sensibilities' can in this sense be said to describe a relationship to design that relies upon the senses rather than the rational analysis of the made environment (Hendrix and Fulton Suri, 2010). With the development of User-Centred approaches to design in the 1990s, there has been an increasing appreciation of the idea that the things we make and use can as much be about feeling as practical function. In the past twenty years our perceptual relationship to design has increasingly moved to centre stage in the discourse of design. However, this idea that design engages us in such a way has tended to emphasize ‘product experience’ and ‘engagement’ in relation to concepts such as usability, and this approach sought to render emotion and sensual experience of design quantifiable and measurable, yet my contention is that it is based on an ontological assumption. This is the idea that there is a ‘normal’ or typical human neurological phenotype, that ‘we’ all respond in more or less the same way to stimuli and thus experience design in a similar manner. My current research is thus a challenge to this received wisdom.

Recent work on the history of emotion suggest that far from ‘feeling’ being a set quality of the human animal in response to its environment, rather such responses are culturally specific (Watt Smith, 2016). Similarly, developments in the field of cultural neuroscience have thus begun to demonstrate how activities such as seeing, touching, hearing and taste are not fixed qualities of a given physiology, but the result of biological processes meeting social ones (Lin & Telzer, 2018). At the same time research into the nature of embodied cognition, how thinking is not just a quality of the brain but something that is distributed throughout the organism, is coming to suggest that the way we ‘understand’ the world is actually a process of making sense that is not just situated in the body but arises out of being an embodied self. In recent years knowledge developed in the study of conditions such as Autism, ADHD and dyslexia have come to emphasize how the way people perceive the world is not homogeneous but diverse and multifaceted. Thus the paradigm of ‘neurodiversity’ is one which suggests that how we perceive the world varies both within and between social groups, whereby it is a form of human diversity ‘that is subject to the same social dynamics as other forms of diversity (including dynamics of power and oppression)’ (Walker 2019). This therefore has profound implications for the practice of design, and is a area of knowledge and practice that has yet to be systematically explored. One of the central strands of my current work is therefore an investigation into the  theoretical dynamics and practical ethics of design that acknowledges neurodiversity in the context of embodied cognition. I am also very interested in the changing dynamics of embodied pub cultures.

PhD Completions

Speight, Catherine (2018) Looking, Understanding and Making Meaning: Higher Education Ceramics Students as a 'Community of Learners'

Marmont, Giovanni, (2019) Nanopoetics of Use: Kinetic prefiguration and dispossessed sociality in the undercommons

Sanchez-Moreno, Lilian (2020) Towards Professional Recognition: Social Responsibility in Design Discourse and Practice from the Late 1960s to the Mid 1970s

Rowland, Suzanne (2020) The role of design, technology, female labour, and business networks in the rise of the fashionable, lightweight, ready-made blouse in Britain, 1909-1919

Bailey, Jocelyn (2021) Governmentality and power in 'design for government': an ethnography of an emerging field

My research interests include writing and mindfulness, writing practice, writing about practice, disability and hair. These are connected by an abiding interest in intersectional feminism, queer theory, neurodivergence, and writing the weird, after Joanne Limburg's work on weirdness. What does it mean to read, write and think from a position of queerness, neurodivergence, disability, hairiness or of so-called strangeness or weirdness? Does the weird create a 'reading effect' (Felman 1977) or a creative '[writing] effect'? And what does the weird do to / how does it act on culture?

Over the last few years, I have trained in digital and independent publishing, and have self-published four guides to the writing process as a result, and keep a blog on my author website.

James's research focus links regenerative design, material circularity and distributed manufacture. Where the localisation of material and labour assets, learning and supply chains offer opportunities to disrupt centralised (and non-regenerative) modes of production and consumption.

He has led national and international research into the value of shared and open knowledge transfer between stakeholders to enable more socially just and less environmental impactful to enact economic development. Significant projects including the EPSRC-funded Future Makespaces in Redistributed Manufacturing and Citizen Nature Watch.

He is currenly working on projects funded by EPSRC (Ecological Citizens Network) and AHRC (Future Observatory), that take a design-led approached to linking local communities, practices, needs and resources in the exploration of more regenerative modes of production. 

Neurodivergent-affirming practice

As an autistic and ADHD person, living with complex PTSD, I am interested in research into ways practice can become affirming and inclusive of neurodivergent people's needs, across the lifespan. Intersectionality is important in this work, through taking an approach that addresses the complex ways in which neurodivergence intersects with different people's other core identities such as age, gender, race, and sexuality.  

#TheDarkSideOfOccupation

The Dark Side of Occupation is a concept I created and continue to develop. This means I aim to continue to research aspects of occupation, and of people's subjective experiences of occupation, that have previously been ignored or extremely under-explored. 

My PhD was an endeavour to do just this, as I researched the impact of woman-to-woman rape. This is a complex form of sexual offending; victim/survivors are invisible and silenced and, as I found, often cope alone or with very little support.  

My interests are based upon my belief that it is no longer acceptable to ignore all of the occupations that people subjectively experience and that can impact upon their health and/or their well-being - be it in a helpful or a detrimental way. The range of occupations we should consider ranges from the everyday, mundane right through to the more extreme, perhaps risky and illegal.  

My doctoral work has really ignited an interest in further exploring the impact of trauma and the associated ways in which people can action endurance, survival, and identity renegotiation through a range of occupations that could be considered by some as 'adaptive' or 'maladaptive'. Though, occupation is more complex than any such binary distinction, as the subjective experience can alter or transform in response to, or because of, various factors that impact upon human occupation.  

In line with this aim to gain a more authentic understanding of human occupation, I identify as a Feminist Auto/Biographical researcher, meaning I concur with Letherby (2014, p. 45) that "research is informed by auto/biographical experience and is an intellectual activity that involves a consideration of power, emotion and P/politics".  

Funding Applications Awarded 

• 2021 - Awarded seed funds from Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, University of Brighton 
• 2021 - Awarded 'seed grant' funds from Faculty of Health, University of Canberra, Australia (as external Co-Investigator on team project with Dr Daniela Castro de Jong as Chief Investigator).  
• 2021 – Awarded seed funds from CORE Transforming Sexuality and Gender (CTSG), University of Brighton 
• 2019 - Awarded pump-priming funds from Institute of Health & Community, University of Plymouth  
• 2019 - Awarded funds from Continuing Professional Development Grants Panel, Elizabeth Casson Trust 
• 2013 - Awarded funds from Social Science Doctoral Training Centre (DTC), University of Plymouth 

Other Scholarly Awards 

• 2022 - Journal of Occupational Science. I am proud to have supported Rachel Rule by co-authoring our paper Developing an occupational perspective of women involved in sex work: A discussion paper. Rachel was the recipient of the 2021 Wilcock Award for Emerging Authors for: 1) Excellence/innovation of the topic, 2) Contributes to the advancement of occupational science, 3) Well-crafted writing. 

With over 30 years of teaching experience, Phil Tyler is interested in developing a PhD research proposal looking at the pedagogy of drawing in HE and its history throughout the 20th and into the 21st century.

His academic research at the university is focussed on teaching drawing as well as developing an understanding of how drawings underpin students visual enquiry and problem solving in a variety of different art and design contexts

My research focuses on care, broadly understood and informed by feminist care ethics. This conceptualises care as fundamental to human and non-human well-being and survival, and intrinsically relational. Using this framework my research spans a range of topics – ageing, social care and self-funded care, well-being in old age, intergenerational relationships, adult social care practice and participation. Care ethics informs my research approach through co-producing knowledge with people and community groups. I am a qualitative researcher and use relational research practices to guide participatory research processes and develop conceptual understanding of knowledge based in lived experiences.

I have a long-standing interest in the impacts of welfare and social policy on everyday life which predates my academic career. I worked for many years in the voluntary and community sector and witnessed the impact of changes to welfare and housing services from the 1980s onwards. These experiences have shaped the direction of my academic career and ongoing commitment to producing research that is accessible beyond an academic audience.

Recent and current projects

2021 – 2025 Kent Adult Social Care Partnership NIHR HS&DR funded (PI Ann-Marie Towers, University of Kent). Kent Adult Social Care Partnership

The Kent Research Partnership is one of six capacity building, social care partnerships funded by the NIHR Health Services and Delivery (HS&DR) programme in England. The four-year programme of work will develop sustainable Kent-based partnerships to support the delivery of high quality social care research on the topics that matter most in the region. This partnership aims to improve care quality by investing in and valuing the social care workforce, and developing a culture of research and evidence-based practice and innovation.

2020 - Understanding fairness between different generations in times of COVID-19. Collaborative project with South East England Forum on Ageing.

2020 - Learning from Covid-19 in Adult Social Care. Collaborative project with Health and Adult Social Care, Brighton and Hove City Council.

2017 - 2021 Ethical Issues in self-funded social care: co-producing knowledge with older people. Funded by Wellcome Trust. Multi-site collaboration with University of Birmingham and University of Lincoln. Qualitative study focused on older people’s lived experiences of funding their social care, co-produced with older people with lived experience and social care commissioners, providers and practitioners.

2018 – 2020 Ethical Issues in self-funded social care: co-producing knowledge with older people. Funded by Wellcome Trust. Public engagement partnership with Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery. Commissioned exhibition and public engagement programme at Fabrica Brighton, Ikon Birmingham and Frequency Digital Festival, Lincoln: Care(less) | by Lindsay Seers | Fabrica, Brighton, UK.

2015 – 2016 Older people’s experiences of sight loss in care homes. Funded by Thomas Pocklington Trust.

2015 Going it Alone: exploring older people’s experiences of self-funding care. Rising Stars Award, University of Brighton.

2011 – 2012 Developing a Knowledge Exchange on Older People's Involvement with an Ethic of Care.  ESRC funded Follow on Funding project translating research findings through knowledge exchange with social care practitioners, producing research-based films and learning resources for social care with older people: Older people, well-being and participation - films and learning resources.

Carolyn Watt is a lecturer in Cultural and Critical Studies for the BA (Hons) Fashion Business, BA (Hons) Textiles and Business and BA (Hons) Fashion Communication and Business. Carolyn is interested in the intersection between circus, performance, and identity. Her research interests include community arts-based practices, practice-based research, digital technologies, costume and textile design, tactile experience and art for social change. 

Mark's research looks at the role digital technology has on our experience of the natural world around us. He does this through creating and designing interventions in the physical space to ask questions and raise awareness of our use of technology and the impact on our awareness of time and space and the world around us.

Mark uses design as a tool to provoke questioning and self-awareness of our relationship, experience & understanding with the physical environment, with the aim to recognise the importance of ‘headspace’. Through this, his research looks at the intersection of art, design and technology and the impact they have in shaping culture and society.

Mark works specifically on projects about social wellbeing and community building that are cross-disciplinary, collaborative and creative, where digital interactive design and user experience is used to build awareness and engagement.

Dr Claire Wintle is a historian of exhibitions, museums and collections, with a particular interest in curatorial practice, exhibition design and the politics of representation. Her work explores the relationship between museums and processes of nationalism, imperialism and decolonisation, often with a focus on South Asia and the UK.

Claire is Principal Lecturer in Museum Studies and Art and Design History. She is Director of the University's Centre for Design History where she leads research, including on the museum as a designed space that is both produced and consumed. She was the founding Course Leader for the MA Curating Collections and Heritage, a collaborative masters programme developed between the University of Brighton and Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. Her teaching focuses on the ethics of contemporary museum practice, with an emphasis on widening participation in and access to cultural heritage.

Claire’s early research focused on nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial collecting and display in and of South Asia, with a particular focus on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Her monograph is entitled Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. She is currently working on two projects within a broader research agenda that examines the impact of exhibition and museum-making on imperialism and post-independence nation building during the middle years of the twentieth century.

- The first project focuses on curatorial practice in the UK between 1945 and 1980, using archival research and oral histories to consider how curators with responsibility for ‘ethnographic’ or ‘world cultures’ collections grappled with the professionalisation of their field, post-war recovery and the ‘end’ of empire. Claire is particularly interested in the lessons that can be learnt from historic examples of museum labour, international networks, repatriation and exhibition making in our current ‘decolonising’ moment. With Ruth Craggs, she edited Cultures of Decolonisation, and has published widely on this theme. With her students, Kate Guy and Hajra Williams, she organised the major international conference Museum Exhibition Design: Histories and Futures, which also developed some of this work. The proceedings will be published by Routledge as Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum: Makers, Process and Practice, with contributions from scholars, designers and museum professionals from Argentina, China, France, Germany, Korea, Pakistan, Switzerland, the UK and US.

Claire was recently awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant for the project 'Making Museum Professionals, 1850-the present' with Dr Kate Hill at the University of Lincoln. This new network will support and develop contemporary campaigns for inclusivity and fairness in the sector by investigating the historical roots of the museum professions and the structures that supported them.

- The second project examines post-independence exhibitions of India in the UK and US (1947-1986), with an emphasis on shows generated by South Asian artists, designers and curators. Claire is especially interested in how exhibition making and cultural diplomacy probed the limits of national identity for cultural practitioners.

Claire is also in the process of initiating a new major interdisciplinary research project entitled ‘Curating Challenging Collections’. This will explore how museum practitioners today can cultivate professional resilience while working with historic collections associated with traumatic events and processes such as slavery, colonialism and sexual abuse. Working with professional associations and museums, as well as scholars and practitioners of health, cultural memory, and material culture, the project builds on Claire’s recent projects on curating decolonisation and colonial collecting to address the contemporary legacies of historic injustices in museums. The project is designed to support the wellbeing and mental health of a stretched museum workforce and contribute to improved working environments for curators, as well as support wider audience and community access to the collections themselves.

In addition, Claire is the current recipient of an AHRC Digital Pilot Skills Large Grant. With PI Karina Rodriguez Echavarria, she is setting up the Centre for Digital Skills in Visual and Material Culture designed to upskill the Arts and Humanities community in the creation, management, and use of multidimensional (2D/3D) digital media. 

Audrey's research interests stems from her clinical experience, working in partnership with people with learning or intellectual disability and their caregivers. 

Audrey's current series of research projects integrates her clinical knowledge and experience with her personal interest in the concepts of humanising and empathic home environment designing (designing that puts the person in the centre and can evoke emotion, attention, and influence sensation and wellbeing). She is interested in the influence of 'home' on people, which considers the sensory experience and use of space within home designing and how it may affect one's emotions and participation in order to thrive and flourish in that space. 

Her collaborative research with experts-by-experience and colleagues in practice aims to increase the understanding of the occupational therapy contribution to this area. The overall goal is to better support people with intellectual disabilities to live a safe and sustainable quality of life in their homes and communities.

She is also interested in the use of photography/photos as as a creative and visual research method. 

A list of research/supervisory areas of interest can be found further below. 

Contemporary West African arts: people, practices, networks and tourism development opportunities. Investigating art champions, SMEs productivity and tourism development in West-Africa: Looking beyond the commercial value of the “artefact”.

My research identifies innovative, socially responsible, sustainable and ethical pathways to contemporary arts and community-based tourism development and productivity in West-Africa.

African Contemporary arts is increasingly contributing to business innovation and socially responsible entrepreneurship at grass root level. The role of champions, beyond their immediate artistic engagement is evident on Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Cote D’Ivoire and Mali.

 My research develops critical understanding of the “value of arts” beyond the commercial meaning of the term, and the role of champions in the development of the creative sector SMEs (i.e. galleries, fairs, museums, studios) and value chain connection with the tourism sector in West-Africa.

My research currently focuses on the relationship between the community living and working in Castello, one of the 4 historic districts of Cagliari (Italy), and their own heritage, with a special interest on this community’s perception of the scars left in the area by WWII. This research will also explore the idea of heritage as personal and collective memory, but also the different definitions of heritage between heritage professionals and communities.

In this PhD I will be writing an autoethnographic novel exploring growing up gay in a homophobic culture (the UK in the 1960s and 70s) and becoming a gay activist in Brighton, UK, in the 80s and 90s. In addition, and from my perspective as a psychotherapeutic counsellor, I investigate the re-languaging of LGBT+ trauma. I explore therapeutic interventions that challenge the language of 'gay shame' and 'internalised homophobia', looking to find a more positive language that can identify wounding as well as the possibility of healing; moving from the language of deficiency to the language of personal empowerment.

I joined the University of Brighton in 2022 as a PhD student in the department of HSS. My research is exploring the relationship between English language and literacy acquisition among refugee background children in the UK, and their psychological, social and physical wellbeing.

My interest in equality in education led me to my role as a Student Researcher on the Inclusive Assessment QAA project for the Learning and Teaching hub. I was also part of the research team for the Hopeful Solidarities project based in Brighton, looking at the ways in which different organisations foster solidarity. 

My research explores an approach to food studies that centres creative practice. I question how our food futures are framed, what is good enough, and the environmental and nutitional health values that are promoted as solutions. 

I engage with my own relationship to food, as both researcher and participant in working towards reminaging food futures, with a particular focus on the UK food system. I am interested in how these futures can be tasted, and how with a food design approach, the consumption of food becomes an essential part of the research process. 

My work explores the role of FOOD ART and FOOD DESIGN in navigating food issues and food values and everyday food realities in the UK. I am particuarly interested in popular food culture and food media, from Fanny Cradock and Julia Child to new representations of food practices in the digital realm.

Storytelling and/as memory making; poetry as practice, poetry as method; inter Caribbean migrations, (African) diasporic subject formation and (African) diasporic spaces; poetic inquiry; knowledge production.

A Techné AHRC funded doctoral student, researching the social practice of Lefkaritika, a unique style of Cypriot needlework inscribed onto the United Nation’s ‘List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’. A socially engaged practitioner, with experience of working with vulnerable communities especially through the foregrounding of women’s voice. Current research explores safeguarding practice and considers creative methods in providing alternative approaches to cultural heritage preservation. Ethnographic field work conducts the first audit of archive material and gathers previously unrecorded stories of lacemakers lives. Revealing multilayered silences in the history and practice of the craft, a series of creative interventions, including the production of a Photobook and a course for emerging artists, develops a decolonial listening practice inspired by defining features of the craft itself.

PhD Research title: "What does sequential art tell us about architectural interactions that other media do not?”

My research is inter-disciplinary, within the overlap between architecture theory and comics studies - recently entitled ‘Graphic Architecture’. As a nascent area of research, there are opportunities to shape the field, adding to existing research on social interaction with architecture and understanding of how the language of comics works.

Architectural environments have been paramount to many comics, and strips used as an architectural feature in Barbara Nessim’s installation at Centria, New York, and Joost Swarte’s interiors in Haarlem. This tradition can be traced back to sequential art on Trajan's Column and Stations of the Cross across Europe.

I am researching how depiction of human interaction with architecture in comics has similarities with architectural drawings and capturing of architecture on film but offers possibilities that other media do not, and whether the medium has a more ‘revealing’ narrative quality regarding architectural interaction otherwise limited in other flat forms of depiction. To collect first-hand information about the creation of comics through interviews of practitioners, I present the UK’s only broadcast radio show on comic books – Panel Borders – on the Arts Council Radio Station (Resonance FM) in London.

I am a first year AHRC Techne Collaborative Doctoral Award Phd Researcher with the University of Brighton. My doctoral thesis title is, 'Where are all the Lesbians? In search of Lesbian Lives in Museums.'

This project is in collaboration with the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust (RPMT). My central aim is to investigate how RPMT represents lesbian historic and contemporary lives and identies, through the interrogation of it's collections and written archive records. 

The project draws on gender and sexuality studies, art history, material and visual culture and museum studies to utilise an intersection of methodologies: archive and catalogue research in the RPMT's museums, and close analysis of LGBTQ+ displays informed by autoethnography and autotheory. I will develop workshops and exhibition making at RPMT with trans-generational cis-gendered and trans lesbian women participants to foster mutual learning and recognition, empowering those involved as active partners of the institution. 

My research interests primarily lie in heterolingualism. I focus on languages and literature, comparative literature, creative writing, linguistics and psycholinguistics, literary phenomenology and aesthetics. My work looks at how heterolingual poetry reveals the poet's emotional attachment to the languages they use in their writing.

Gabriel uses arts-based practices (including visual art, theatre of the oppressed, and zine-making) to facilitate dialogues and healing, conduct participatory action research, and develop strategic responses to trauma and violence. Gabriel has experience in managing and implementing regional projects in southern Africa on topics related to gender and sexuality, poverty and hunger, and diversity and inclusion. Gabriel last worked at the University of Cape Town, where they piloted the innovative Creative Change Laboratory (CCoLAB). The project created an art-activism laboratory to empower marginalized youth in Cape Town. The ambitious project culminated in an exhibition, zine and mini-documentary. Gabriel is currently pursuing their PhD at the University of Brighton. 

Toni King is undertaking a part time PhD researching how power is experienced by people who self harm and staff in community mental health teams within their interactions. Participatory image production, interviews and focus groups will be used to explore the experiences of both those providing and those accessing services. Critical discourse analysis will be undertaken alongside the Lived Experience Research Advisors employed to ensure a coproduced approach to this research.  

Toni's MSc on Exploring Coproduction in UK Recovery Colleges and published work relating to  Recovery Colleges and the Recovery Approach precede this work.

My thesis examines the interplay between voice and sculpture to understand their manifold interrelationships in the fields of fine art, sound art and new media, and to establish the concept of voice sculpture. 

Areas of research: Fine Art, Sound Art, Sound, Practice-Based Research.

Specialising in art, electroacoustic music, hybridity, installation, musique concrète, sound sculpture, video art, voice.

In this Practice-as-Research study, I examine the phenomena of peak-experience and flow states in particular filmmakers' experience of Screendance.  In this context, I examine the potential impact of the heightened sensory and trancelike states on the filmmaker during the phenomena and her interactions between the various components in the production and the work produced and the potential impact on viewer experiences.

I am a PhD Researcher funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership.

My doctoral research examines how young people in England experience romantic heartbreak within the current social policy landscape. In a time of economic uncertainty, austerity measures and the aftermath of Covid-19, young people face increased precarity in accessing education, stable income and housing. My thesis explores how these socio-economic challenges intersect with relationship breakdowns, impacting mental health and aspiration. Through open-ended qualitative methods, I aim to generate insights into how heartbreak influences life trajectories and to offer recommendations for educators, policymakers and youth services to better support young people in forming and maintaining romantic relationships.

My research interests extend to digital cultures and intimacies, gender roles in romantic relationships, youth policy and lived experience, relationships and sex education in England (RSE), participatory narrative research methods, young people in the austerity era, Covid-19 and the on-going cost-of-living-crisis. 

My creative practice thesis, 'Re(-)collecting cabaret. A queer haunted autoethnography of real, researched and imagined stories of cabaret past and present,' is in two parts. The creative element 'Ghostcards' is an autoethnographic novel recalling the life of a young male dancer in a small touring cabaret dance company in Italy in the 1980s, acknowledging an undocumented period in dance history. It also stories people and places from the origins of the modern cabaret in fin-de-siècle Paris, bringing the past and present together in a magically real space, where real, researched and imagined lives meet, haunt and interact within my lived experience. The critical element, set in a cabaret nightclub, focuses on a new approach to autoethnographic and academic writing that offers a haunted, magically real text resisting the traditional patriarchal discourse of academic narratives through the use of an autoethnographic novel.

I am a PhD researcher at the University of Brighton, situated in the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics. Through feminist postructural policy analysis, I am studying the racialisation of health and environmental discourses in English policy on Green Social Prescribing (GSP). Drawing from race and cultural studies, and science and technology studies, my PhD offers a genealogical analysis of the 'problems' of racialised inequalities in access to nature and health inequalities. Through analysing the political processes of knowledge production, the limits and contingencies of GSP-as-solution are made visible. By expanding and specifying an understanding of space, race, and health as mutually constituted, I advocate for alternative policymaking and healthcare design processes.

My research is funded by the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership. 

My project explores how decolonisation guidance from scholars, professional organisations and museum leaders affects the learning approach used by museums and the practice of learning staff, particularly those in public-facing roles. Drawing on literature from museum studies, psychology and decolonial theory, I will examine how this guidance is enacted through interactions between institutions, individual staff and audiences to build a comprehensive picture of the changes that occur. Using ethnographic case studies of UK-based museums who have publicly announced their commitment to decolonisation as part of their institutions’ work, this project aims to shed light on effective strategies for implementing decolonisation guidance that responds to specific concerns of various practitioners and public trust in decolonial work. 

I am a PhD researcher and a professional storyteller, interested in particular in the folklore, mythology and social history of the British Isles; the intersection of stories, landscape and identity; the role of narrative in shaping culture and sense of self; and in using storytelling to understand past and present. My PhD uses storytelling practice and existing "eco-storytelling" models to look at the potential to improve community engagement and environmental awareness through increased awareness of local history, folklore, and one's own personal narratives. I am particularly keen to explore how such models can engage with urban/suburban life and space.

Other interests include the place of myth in subcultural/group identity (especially regarding popular music); the historical insights offered by medieval narratives such as the Mabinogion and Beowulf ; use of mythology and folklore in fiction; and culture and society in British prehistory.

My research is practice-based, working towards the development of a poetic memoir. This writing is a crip ecofeminist reflection on trauma and bereavement, addressing my own experiences of disability and gender-based violence, and finding parallels and affinities with the violence, trauma, and disablement that characterises ecocide, anthropocentrism, and the ideologies of climate catastrophe. As part of my commitment to crip / neuroqueer writing, I am exploring the political and intellectual significance of hybrid forms of writing, particularly those that can be defined as both critical and creative. This interest is equally informed by ecofeminist understandings of the human/nature binary, and how these categories might intersect with other binarisms both within and outside of the academy.

Among other methods, my writing is developed through a practice of walking-with non-human others. As well as an interest in the non-human as plant and animal, my work investigates the inhuman in notions of hauntedness, spectrality, and the supernatural. These are explored through a nueroqueer lens, and negotiated alongside understandings of eco-trauma as an experience of the uncanny.

Mel's research interests are within the field of health sciences and psychology. She is particularly passionate about the emotional well-being of performing artists living with adversities. Currently investigating musicians' lives, she takes a particular focus on resilience and mental health. Mel aims to bring new research to the field of well-being for young emerging artists. 

My practice - based research explores the concept of ‘frailty of old age’ in which I use a single case study to examine my mother’s lived experience of this syndrome. My positionality as daughter/informal carer/researcher is central to the project. An ‘autoethnographic alliance’ has been formed between mother and daughter; this evolving methodology uses a critical approach to incorporate evocative visual storytelling which makes space for my combined roles to function cohesively. Together we employ strategies which help us to navigate and subvert the emotional impact which the care infrastructure has placed upon us. I am siting the project within the conceptual framework of magical realism as a mode for the “vulnerable and marginalised to challenge the viewpoints of those who have authority over them” (Faris, 2004). Themes of care, anticipatory grief and the unassimilated nature of trauma are investigated using devices such as the mixing of discourses, temporal disruption and the incorporation of the supernatural. 

ESRC Funded PhD Researcher, focusing on LGBTQAI+ experiences on community gardens and multispecies wellebeing. 

As a researcher with a focus on urban community gardens, I investigate how these spaces can address complex socio-political, environmental, and wellbeing challenges, with a specific emphasis on the experiences of LGBTQAI+ communities. My work in Brighton explores how community gardens, as spaces of human and multispecies interactions, foster meaningful connections within the LGBTQAI+ community while advancing more-than-human wellbeing. This research aims to understand the potential of community gardens in promoting social inclusion and environmental interdependence, particularly in urban spaces, and to provide actionable insights that value multispecies wellbeing amid environmental crises.My work engages community garden spaces and local queer nature initiatives in Brighton to co-create future urban imaginaries. By bridging gaps in current community garden literature, I strive to highlight how these gardens can support underexamined communities and expand on the critical need for green, inclusive spaces in urban planning. This research holds significance for both community-led sustainability efforts and broader applications, offering actionable insights for enhancing health, wellbeing, and inclusive urban ecosystems.

My interdisciplinary practice-based research explores the multimedia potentials of storytelling to approach the articulation of shame in PTSD through synthesising psychological research with theories of creative writing, literary analysis and creative practice. My PhD research consists of an online multimedia novel together with critical, theoretical and reflective thesis that fuses embodied narrative methodology and experiential cyber storytelling with trauma and shame studies.

I combine lived experience with practice-based research developed throughout my previous studies whereby my experiential digital multimodal creative practice emerged from my research into PTSD and trauma, and later in my MA developed into an exploration and multimedia creative expression of the connection between PTSD and shame. My auto fictional novel, Indelible Stain, a continuation of this foundational work, articulates my personal experience of PTSD and shame with its experimental, fragmented, multimedia, multi-perspectivity form. My creative practice explores the connection between PTSD, trauma and shame, the effect of shame on PTSD and the self, as it explores shame through personal, relational and cultural situations and experiences.

My research investigates LGBTQ+ persons’ lived experiences that remain largely hidden in public discourse about GRT (Gypsy, Romany and Traveller) communities.

I seek to explore the untapped potential of heritage sites such as museums, archives and cultural community platforms – both as online and physical spaces - to provide a medium through which to enable LGBTQ+ Travellers+ to explore and celebrate identity formation through an intersectional methodology.

The project also examines the role of arts practitioners as curators of public identity formation and consider how young persons from marginalised backgrounds might be given agency through their engagement with these practitioners and the wider arts and heritage community.

This innovative, interdisciplinary research project uses creative methodologies to produce evidence of the lived experiences of  LGBTQ+ Travellers+ in the UK, via socially engaged co-produced, participatory, community-based methods.

My project is in collaboration with Traveller Pride, Queer Britain Museum, and Mernmaids

Sadie Rockliffe is an ESRC SCDTP-funded PhD student researching the lived experiences of visually impaired (VI) individuals in blue spaces, with a focus on wellbeing, interdependence, and accessibility. Her work is informed by therapeutic landscape research, critical disability studies, and blue space geographies, examining how people with VI engage with aquatic environments beyond ocularcentric assumptions.

Sadie’s PhD will explore how VI individuals navigate and experience blue spaces, particularly within the social practice of outdoor swimming. While blue spaces are increasingly recognised for their therapeutic potential, they are also shaped by systemic exclusions, inaccessible infrastructures, and normative assumptions about ability, movement, and perception. This research highlights how water’s materiality—its movement, unpredictability, and sensory affordances—creates distinct embodied experiences, often overlooked in mainstream accessibility discourse.

The project is guided by participant-led inquiry, amplifying VI perspectives on blue space engagement. Rather than assuming all VI individuals interact with water in the same way, the research recognises diverse lived realities, shifting sensory capacities, and temporal experiences of sight loss. By centering sociomateriality, interdependence, and fluid accessibility frameworks, this study aims to rethink inclusion beyond static, infrastructure-based models, contributing to a more dynamic, participant-driven understanding of blue space access.

Before arriving at the University of Brighton, Sadie spent over 20 years working with governing bodies and local communities to build inclusive accessible events and destination management strategies.

I am an artist and writer with a research-based practice based in North Herefordshire, UK. I primarily use photographic processes and techologies to examine human relationships, particularly in relation to identity and the natural world, using a variety of traditional, modern and experimental photographic techniques (often within the same projects) to explore both the limits and flexibility of the medium. A principle focus of mine is the practice of embedding the subject of my creative and research interests within the material of its represenation. 

I am also interested in photography's relationship to other media as a method to deepen and expand audience engagement with complex themes and subjects. Some examples of this are the inclusion of sound, sculpture and living plants within the exhibition space to create an immersive environment.

My part-time, practice-based PhD project draws on these themes through the oak tree as a case study. Inspired by research that considers the intelligence and agency of plants and the comparison between photography and plants' dual reliance on light, my thesis comprises of a series of experimental photographic methods that seek to collaborate, or make-with, a collection of oak trees and their organic material to invite them into, and become part of, the process of their representation.

Broadly speaking my research interests cover photographic theory, history and practice; plant-intelligence; critical plant studies; queer ecology and queer theory.

My research interests include the ways design shapes and is shaped by systems of care, health, and inequality. My AHRC-funded PhD explored how design practices in the UK contribute to health inequities, with a particular focus on breastfeeding and caregiving as sites of cultural stigma, systemic exclusion, and potential transformation. The project paid particular attention to class-based disparities and the marginalisation of maternal voices within both health and design contexts. I drew on feminist, decolonial, and practice-based approaches to challenge dominant biomedical and individualised narratives, instead foregrounding relational, situated, and systemic perspectives. I’m particularly interested in design justice, ontological design, and the role of reflexivity in research and practice.

As a black British woman and avid researcher in black British history and doctoral researcher in postcolonial feminist fiction, which will reaffirm gaps in black British history, I am encouraged by the work lead by the Centre for Memory, Narrative and History, which directly links to my continued research.  My continued research enables me to place a spotlight and unearth histories of those currently invisble lives, as a way to reclaim and reimagine black history within Britain and specifically the south of England.  As a representative of black culture, and a reconfirmation of modernity as a black British woman, my work establishes how back history should be placed within the social remit of modern England.  This research is necessary to implement change within Britain and academia.

I am a postgraduate researcher based in Brighton. My photographic practice is concerned with the interaction between the medium and the human. My work draws from philosophy to explore how photographic qualities, such as its relationship with memories and representation, can be approached differently through the photographic process and performance. I work in both digital and analogue media, encompassing all formats, including cameraless processes, to articulate the material condition of photography and its production.

My research interests lie in the relationship between the experimental cameraless photography and the operator, viewed through a feminist lens. Informed by the philosophy of New Materialism, I am interested in the idea of nonhuman agency in the traditional printing process. My research positions the darkroom as a site where the female body negotiates the material process and photographic technology, embodying traditions associated with the practice.

I am broadly interested in the intersection of psychology and social policy, and the relationships between social (policy) context and wellbeing. For instance, I was first author on a paper in the Journal of Social Policy exploring the effect of Universal Credit of welfare benefit recipients' life satisfaction.

My interests are broadly focused on creative writing, though with an inter-disciplinary perspective. My primary focus within creative writing is fiction. Within creative writing, the topics currently holding and attracting my attention follow:

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unreadability

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irrealism

I am a doctoral researcher exploring Black people's experiences of love, intimacy and desire within the context of 'psychosis' and recovery. My PhD research is a qualitative, interdisciplinary project, underpinned by a phenomenological approach. My work focuses on mental distress and the importance of relationality, as well as challenging colonial and racist legacies within mental health frameworks.

I am a lived experience researcher and have a strong interest in creative methods and radical methodologies. As a spoken word artist outside of academia, it has felt natural to interweave poetic inquiry throughout my work; I create poems from relevant literature to include in my thesis, and utilise poetic analysis as an interpretative method of analysing data.

I am passionate about decolonisation, as well as re-indiginisation (revisiting and returning to Black and Indigenous understandings prior to colonisation). Within my work I consider and challenge racist and colonial legacies within academia, mental health/distress, sexuality, relationships and relationality.

Identification of subconscious and unconscious hybridity in cultural hybrid writing:  contextualization of a third space in cultural hybrid literature particularly in my novel LTR.