Who we are

Ross Adamson is a researcher/practitioner in documentary filmmaking and digital storytelling. He has completed a Doctorate in Education at Bournemouth University on practical knowledge and documentary filmmaking.  He has collaborated on several digital storytelling projects (AHRC and EU funding).  He publishes narrative hermeneutic research in auto/biography, and documentary filmmaking and digital storytelling practices.

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.

• Inequalities in health, gender, sexuality and age
• Feminism and new or socio materialist approaches to health and care
• Feminist phenomenology, embodiment, mobile, visual and sensory methods
• Arts, wellbeing and health
• Community health and community nursing and equalities.

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.

I trained as an architect and practice as an artist, whose practice often engages with the public realm.

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 proposed that a 'poetics of re-generation' could allow a renegotiation of the instrumentalised term regeneration, expanding the language of regeneration and spatialising relational practice to emphasise an ethics of regeneration practices.

Therefore from a practice perspective, 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 (including a more ethical engagement with pasts of a place, spectral traces and relation to the new).

I'm currently working on Acts of Transfer, a practice-based research project, funded by Arts Council England, and the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at UoB, in collaboration with Dr Lizzie Lloyd (UWE), into the spaces and subjectivities of socially engaged practice and critical writing about the practice.

Through my PhD I became involved with the work of the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant and his poetics of Relation. I'm currently working on research that seeks to understand how we can take Glissant's ideas into spatial and social practice in art and architecture.

I'm interested in the material cultures of migration and trade - which connect the historical and present - for example salt, which formed the basis of my PhD work. I'm interested 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.

Some of my recent artistic projects have explored textiles as a medium, and as part of collaborative research project Making Suburban Faith I worked with Professor Claire Dwyer and researcher Nazneen Ahmed at UCL to produce a collaborative textile art project, which has been written up in a number of papers and chapters, as well as an artists book (see outputs).

Other current art practice and research focuses on Yiddish political cultures in the Jewish East End from the 1880s to the 1930s. This research which has been funded by the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories was presented in an online exhibition in December 2020 and was the focus of an event in June 2021 with Tim Ingold, Ben Gidley and Rachel Garfield.  

For several years Libby’s work has sat at the disciplinary and methodological intersection of architecture and medicine.  Her work explores the points of tension where medical and non-medical space come into focus, namely within Mental Health Services and Midwifery. Libby’s diploma dissertation (2010) was an enquiry into the disciplinary co-production of a midwife led birthing centre in Brent & Harrow.  A feminist reading of the body was adopted then and continues to be used as the point of intersection between professional disciplines, providing a bridge where the creation and critique of artefacts; the user experience or building proposals can be undertaken. 

This interest has informed an ongoing collaboration within Brighton in the Midwifery Programme, initially through options module development, and now as a series of ethnographically grounded birth space workshops, that use transdisciplinary co-design to reveal often-hidden disciplinary standpoints.  

I research relational experience in the context of mental health and wellbeing, as such I am interested in themes such as care, reciprocity, in/exclusion, belonging and intimacy. My recent research focuses on LGBTQ+ relational experiences and their role in distress and recovery.

I typically take a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach and use qualitative methodologies especially creative and visual interview methods, mainly drawing. I developed the Relational Mapping Interview (2019, 2020) to capture subjective experience of the complexities of social networks.

I am particularly interested in developing interdisciplinary research. I have a background in the performing arts and also have a masters in Gestalt psychotherapy. I enjoy collaborating with researchers and artists from a wide range of backgrounds with the aim of humanising and enriching our understanding of distress and wellbeing.

Recent and current projects:

• 2020-22: Pathways between LGBTQ migration, social isolation & mental distress: The temporal-relational-spatial experiences of LGBTQ mental health service-users (funded by UKRI via the 'Loneliness, social isolation & mental health' network; PI Zoë Boden-Stuart)
• 2019-20: Intimacy, medication and mental health (pilot funded by University of Brighton; PI Zoë Boden) 
• 2018-19: Feeling sexual inside and out: Bodies and boundaries in forensic mental health (funded by Wellcome; PI Paula Reavey)
• 2017-18: Relationships and relationality in mental health (funded by ISRF; PI Zoë Boden) 
• 2017-18: Psychosis, connectedness and emerging adulthood (funded by Richard Benjamin Trust; PI Zoë Boden)

I am currently interested in exploring people's embodied and emotional relationships with digital data, devices and platforms in everyday places (e.g. home, work, transport and public spaces). I am focusing on the ways different people have different relationships ‘the digital’, highlighting how power continually manifests in and through digital technologies. I use feminist and queer methodological tools that enable an exploration of these issues.

I am also interested in the relationships between violence, vulnerability and embodiment. I am working on a collaborative project with Man Kind UK about men's unwanted sexual experiences (MUSE), exploring the barriers men face when trying to access formal support. 

My research experience is tied together through geographies of gender, sexuality and the body. At Oxford, I conducted research on the precarious lives of young working-class men, exploring the emotional and embodied experience of austerity. My PhD focused on men who use Grindr. I was interested in the ways masculinity, sexuality and desire emerge as queer men learned to use digital technologies for sex, dates and intimacy. As a research assistant at Newcastle University, I worked with LGBTQ+ people at a higher education institute to examine experiences of diversity and inclusion. In collaboration with Barnardo’s, I also worked with year 5 school children in North East England to explore – and challenge – their understandings of masculinity and what it means to be a man.

Duncan Bullen is an Associate Dean, in the School of Art and Media at the University of Brighton, where he has responsibility for leading Research and Enterprise. He is the Director of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing.Duncan's own research interests are grounded in the materiality of manual drawing. He is concerned with tactile, repetitive, reductive, non-representational drawing strategies which he aligns with the practice of mindfulness meditation. Duncan is interested in how drawing mindfully may communicate spatially and physically as a means to trace the immediacy of lived experience, through tactile, sensory and contemplative engagement with the world. With this comes an interest in arts-health and the interchange between well-being and well-doing in which the lived body, mind and environment are part of the same process of phenomenologically enacting one’s world at a transactional, integrated and visceral level.Duncan’s research aims to contribute and build upon discussions that position drawing as phenomenology, and he situates his research within a comparative context that draws on a convergence of thinking from Eastern and Western philosophies and Japanese aesthetics. Duncan places particular value on practice-based research, which situates drawing within a first-person, experience-based methodology ‘whereby theory emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time that practice is informed by theory’ (Bolt 2007).

Eloise is an Artist and Senior Lecturer in Fashion Communication, specialising in Photography & Moving Image, in the School of Art. Her research practice is underpinned by photography and investigates transitions of space. She works both independently and collaboratively toward interactive public projects and exhibition. 

Eloise has been fascinated by a shift in perception caused by focusing the eye through a lens. This lens becomes a metaphorical gesture. Her research practice has focused on examining photographic space in relation to the real, and more recently, has developed towards utilising interactive technology and 3D virtual space as an extension of conceptual possibilities represented by the photographic. Her research explores technology’s effect on human perception, contemplating our collective immersion in virtual and synthesised realities.

Since graduating with MA Photography, from the Royal College of Art in 2001, Eloise has developed her practice as an artist. She remains actively engaged in research and learning, to inform and contextualise both her teaching and art practice in the wider cultural landscape, gaining Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in 2015, and completing an MA Video Games Art & Design at Goldsmiths in 2018. Eloise is interested in video games technology and gamification in relation to contemporary art practice.

Projects have included augmented reality mobile prototypes exploring synergy of physical and virtual space, 2D and 3D games prototypes, photographic works evoking emotional resonance of human interaction upon place, public performance investigating visual language as tool for shaping perception, written narratives & poetry, series of animated photographic installations exploring tension between still and moving imagery.

Isobel Creed is a Research Communications Officer. She is engaged in research in the field of digital storytelling and has collaborated on a number of projects including Silver Stories, an EU funded project with six European partners, and with Ross Adamson: Moving Stories with Blatchington Mill School, Hidden Voices with Zap Art and Sussex Prisoners Families and Reading on Screen with the University of Bournemouth.

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.

Susan Diab is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Pitt Rivers Museum in conjunction with Oxford University's Medical Research Council's Brain Network Dynamics Unit and the Oxford branch of Parkinson's UK. The aim of this project is to develop wearable technologies to assist people living with Parkinson's to negotiate its effects. Susan's role is threefold: to visualise prototypes, to interpret the Pitt Rivers Collection of artefacts for clues it may yield towards the project aim and thirdly to facilitate the participants' creativity as expert co-designers.

She is a visual artist (sculptor) and writer with a context- and circumstance-specific practice, meaning that how she works is responsive both to place and to events occurring at the time of working. With a first degree in Modern Languages (French and German) and a second in Fine Art - Sculpture, her practice works across making and writing with both activities often interrelating. She is a founder member of the group artist studio APEC (Art Producing Economic Community), an association of around 15 artists sharing and co-running space in Hove. APEC regularly puts on Open Studio events to welcome the local community in to its activities. 

At the University of Brighton, where she has been teaching for 20 years, she is a Senior Lecturer on the Fine Art Critical Practice (FACP) BA(Hons) course. In this role and in keeping with her own practice focus, she set up and runs the Fine Art Placement Scheme after the model of the Artist Placement Group. These Fine Art Placements afford Level 5 students the opportunity to spend one semester in a non-art setting within the University in order to gain new impetus for and insights into their work. 

My research predominantly focuses on the political and social role of football fans and the social role of sport in general. This includes thinking about th eimpact sport has on climate change, the positive effect fans can have in challenging discrimination in football, and helping local communities and refugees. Social activism invariably brings fans into conflict with the various regulatory bodies, such as football federations, governments and the police. Understanding the wider political economy of football helps situate these conflicts in their wider context. I supervise PhD students on projects related to sustainability and sport, political economy of sport, political activism in football, anti-racism and anti-discrimination in sport, and the role sport can play in supporting refugees and migrants.

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

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. 

Dr Aristea Fotopoulou is international consultant to the 3-years research project “MyGender: Mediated young adults’ practices: advancing gender justice in and across mobile apps” (funded by FCT Portuguese public agency for science, technology, and innovation). Aristea has recently completed the UKRI Innovation Fellowship/AHRC Leadership Fellowship funded research project ART/ DATA/ HEALTH: Data as creative material for health and wellbeing. The project created an innovative and interdisciplinary process that offered new tools, at the intersections of data science with art practice, to approach two key issues in healthy aging and prevention: digital skills and health literacy. In 2021 she also led the project 'Impact of COVID-19 on Arts and Health charities' (funded by UKRI Research England’s Quality-related Research Strategic Priorities Funding (QR SPF) 2020-21). 

ART/DATA/HEALTH followed on from Aristea's research "Critical data literacy, Creative media and Social equality" (funded by Rising Stars, University of Brighton 2017), which focused on big data and citizen engagement. The project run training workshops with community and civil society organisations to advance their digital and data analytics skills. 

In November 2020, Aristea edited the Special Issue Digital Culture meets Data: Critical perspectives, in the academic journal Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, with Dr Helen Thornham. The special issue follows on from the  conference Digital Culture Meets Data: Critical Perspectives (November 2017, University of Brighton) organised by the Digital Culture & Communication Section of ECREA. 

Aristea's research about wearable sensors and about the Quantified Self in San Francisco was published in the online platform Open Democracy and in Health Sociology Review. She edited a special issue in digital media praxis for Ada: Journal of Gender, Technology and New Media, (Issue 5, June 2014, with Alex Juhasz & Kate O'Riordan). She served as Chair of the Digital Culture and Communication Section of European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) (2016-18), as Vice Chair (2014-2016) and as Early-career scholar representative (YECREA) of the section between 2012-2014. 

Her first book Feminist Activism and Digital Networks was endorsed by high profile academics in her field Prof Nick Couldry(London School of Economics and Political Science, UK), Prof Rosalind Gill (City, University of London, UK) and Prof Carol Stabile (University of Oregon, USA). The book was been described as: 

“highly recommended”, “an urgently needed antidote to […] the invisibility of gender and sexuality as embodied practices in communication studies and social movement studies alike”; and deemed as “required reading for social justice classrooms.”  

Jane Fox is a visual artist who makes drawings, prints and installations. Her research interests include walking and drawing and are oriented towards personal narrative, collaborative process and Inclusive Arts practice.

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. 

My work centres on how peer relationships can contribute to the development of psychological resilience in the face of complex challenges to mental health and wellbeing, with a particular orientation to lived experience. My research aims to identify, understand and promote the contributions of informal social relationships and practices, especially as these arise in resistance to or as consequence of broad social risks (such as austerity, poverty, stigma, discrimination, colonial legacy, and prevalence of harmful substances). While this may sound grim, my work consistently engages with the strength, humour, support and lightheartedness that can be wrought through social connection.

While I am very much a (critical) psychologist, I believe that successfully engagement with the meanings, opportunities and adaptive benefits of social connection often requires thoughtful inter- and multi-discipinary perspective. For example, my current research involves working with colleagues in public health, media studies, and rehabilitation services. This ESRC/AHRC funded GCRF project is in collaboration with the University of Leeds, Mind India, NIRMAAN Rehabilitation Institute and the Hope Foundation, and uses participatory photography and filmmaking to explore resistance and resilience to problematic substance use among young people in Assam, India. Previously I collaborated with the Overseas Development Institute to draw lessons on psychological resilience for practitioners and researchers working in climate change and humanitarian disaster response. I have also worked with a counselling psychologist to explore the lived experience of peer support in a queer community pub.

I have worked with adults, young people and adolescents facing challenges from alcohol and substance use, socioeconomic vulnerability, and discrimination based on their LGBTQIA+ identity. I primarily use qualitative methods these days, including descriptive and interpretive phenomenological analysis, thematic analysis, and visual methods, but I use non-experimental quantitative methods, too. 

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 work is interdisciplinary and I work closely with evidence bases and colleagues from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, community development, education, social work, psychiatry and nursing. All of my research is co-productive, and as the Academic Director of the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP) I have expertise in applying insights from research within the context of Communities of Practice (CoP). CoPs bring people with a shared passion together across, not only different agencies and disciplines, but also organisational forms and status boundaries, including service users and their carers. I am passionate about using research insights to inform practice developments and vice versa.

I have published widely on health and social care services to disadvantaged children, their families and their supporters, especially in relation to fostering and adoption to midwifery and health visiting and in relation to the concept of resilience. I have also published work on the development of community university partnership programmes. All of my work results in practical applications. Most recently I have been supporting the implementation of my co-developed resilience approaches to mental health across a whole town, funded to the tune of £12million by the National Lottery Community Fund. Blackpool UK is the pilot site for what we are calling a ‘Resilience Revolution’. A key feature of this is an exciting co-productive research programme, by, with and for young people.

Suzanne Hutchinson is a multidisciplinary fine art practitioner who produces drawings, installations, sculptures, paintings, collages, performance and projected image to explore memories and histories of landscape, place, people, bodies, encounters, and sensations. 

Experiences of absence, loss, death and transformation and how these can be marked, commemorated and mapped are areas investigated through Hutchinson’s research. In her art work Suzanne combines image, object and audience relationship to create immersive, reflective, contemplative, spaces where time is slowed and repair and transformation are proposed. 

Examination of the physical and conceptual properties of materials and making processes are key aspects of Hutchinson’s practice with materials and processes highlighting relationships between permanence and transience and between repetition and the performative action in creating meaning. 

Suzanne’s research examines the interplay of two dimensional pictorial space, three dimensional object, and physical encounter to create works which encourage audiences and viewers to pause from their everyday pace. The spaces she creates prompt reflective thought and awareness of the present moment.

Hutchinson’s fine art practice combines independent projects disseminated in national museums and galleries with collaborative projects working with composers, sculptors, performers, writers, actors and choreographers, disseminated in international theatres, performance spaces and specific sites. In Hutchinson’s research and art practice she has taken on varied roles, as solo creator, installation artist, co-creator, theatre director, art director, set, costume and jewellery designer /maker, script editor, community facilitator and educator. 

Scholarly and Art Practice biography

Suzanne is an academic staff member in the Fine Art Sculpture course team whose current role is Course Leader for the Fine Art BA Hons Sculpture course. Suzanne is Level 5 Year tutor and Module Leader for Level 5 studio practice modules within the Sculpture course and Module Leader of The Drawing within the Expanded Field Option Module within the School of Art.

Previously Suzanne was Course Leader of the BA Hons Fine Art Performance and Visual Art (Dance) course and she has led undergraduate degree level studio practice modules at Level 4, Level 5 and Level 6 as part of her extensive teaching experience. Suzanne is a mentor for MA Fine Art students and has considerable experience of devising and writing undergraduate course modules. She has been the elected academic staff member on School Boards and has actively contributed to numerous University of Brighton committees. Suzanne currently serves on SQSA which has responsibility for academic health and is a member of the health and wellbeing committee.

Suzanne’s installations, collages, paintings, sculptures and drawing works have been exhibited and presented in numerous galleries and performance spaces throughout the UK including, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, TOM main house theatre, The University of Brighton galleries,  The Hayward Gallery, The Royal Festival Hall, The Barbican, The Crafts Council Gallery, Nicola Jacobs Gallery (Cork Street), Fabian Carlsson (New Bond Street) and Atlantis Gallery. 

Suzanne’s collaborative projects include work with Glyndebourne Education Department with performance installation outcomes disseminated in Newhaven Fort, Sussex gardens, schools and in the Sussex landscape, with Northlands festival resulting in an opera performance installation involving eighty performers in a Wick bus depot, with the Unit for Art and Offenders and the prison community with work disseminated in a prison chapel, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Phoenix Dance Company, David Glass Mime, Call of the Wild, and writers/ performers Robin Driscoll and Tony Haase with work disseminated through national tours involving multiple UK theatre and festival venues. 

Suzanne is a member of the Drawing Research Network and has contributed her work to the Memories, Narratives and Histories network. She has work in private and public collections and publications on her practice have accompanied a solo exhibition and a collaborative project. Images of her work have featured in national and local newspapers and her work has been reviewed in national arts magazines. 

Suzanne initially trained in Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic where she gained a first class degree, she completed her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art soon afterwards and has subsequently worked consistently within the arts, cultural and educational sector for over two and a half decades.

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:

• The use of participatory, arts-based research (collaborative poetics) to improve health pathways, wellbeing and resilience for people living with invisible, chronic, contested conditions
• Improving the visibility, take-up and impact of social prescribing programmes in Sussex
• Everyday creativity and decolonisation
• LGTBQI+ friendships and community support

My research takes place at the intersections between psychoanalytic theory, Critical Theory, cultural theory and feminist philosophy. I have a particular interest in the philosophy, theory, politics and aesthetics of reproduction and care, and the contribution that psychoanalytic understandings of subjectivity can make to academic knowledge in this area. This research focus is evident in my monograph, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care, published in the Palgrave Macmillan series, Studies in the Psychosocial, in 2022. In this project, I investigated what the work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott can contribute to understanding, as well as addressing, the crisis of care at the heart of contemporary society.

More broadly, my research interests centre on the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and society. I am interested in exploring psychoanalytic thinking as a critical discourse in the Humanities, and as both a product, and active agent, of social and cultural change. I have an interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis, as theory and practice, and social justice; the politics of mental health; and the politics of reproduction and care. Theoretically, my work draws on Freudian, Lacanian, object relations and relational approaches to psychoanalysis, as well as Critical Theory; feminist theory; gender studies; queer theory and cultural studies. Much of my research to date has explored the knots that bind psychoanalytic thinking to cultural practices and social processes.

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. 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 is Principal Lecturer and Course Leader for BA Design for Digital Media, which is based at the University of Brighton's Edward Street campus. She is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and the Academic Lead for Employability in the School of Art and Media. She sits on the school Equality and Diversity Committee, leading the Gender strand, and is a member of the school Ethics Panel.

With a professional background in graphic design, she has extensive design 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 primarily through embroidery, creative writing and book arts. 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.

Vanessa originated the sucessful Women & Domesticity – What’s your Perspective collaborative arts project in 2014, which asks members of the public 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 hundreds of individual contributions. It has been exhibited in art spaces such as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft; at academic symposiums and conferences at the Universities in Loughborough, Bedford, Brighton and the Geffreye Museum with Queen Mary University; and in Libraries, Colleges and other Art Spaces. It has also been presented exhibited and internationally, in both Europe and the US. 

Vanessa has published 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 enaged 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.

Dr Kirsty McGregor is a Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Humanities and Social Science. Her research focuses on domestic and sexual violence and abuse, with a specific focus on victimisation and help-seeking experiences. 

Dr McGregor’s research interests are focussed on the experience of crime and victimisation through an intersectional lens. She is particularly interested in exploring how people experience intimate partner violence, and the ways that age, gender, and sexuality shape their experiences, help-seeking and support needs. Kirsty uses qualitative and mixed methods to explore these issues, and more recently has become interested in participatory and creative methods. Her current research focuses on intimate partner violence experienced by LGBTQ+ people, and men's unwanted sexual experiences.

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, 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. 

Marina is an internationally renowned policy, planning and sustainable development expert and Professor of Tourism and International Development at Brighton School of Business and Law, which is an Affiliate Member of the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO).  

She is a geographer with a background in economics, considerable experience of high-quality research, consultancy, PhD supervision, teaching and curriculum development and a keen interest in interdisciplinary research.  

Between 2017 and 2021, she plaid a key strategic role as Academic Lead for the University of Brighton's Responsible Futures Agenda, an initiative aimed at fostering innovation through impactful interdisciplinary research and consultancy collaborations, at local, national and international level. This laid the ground of the current Global Challenges Agenda.  

Marina has advised on numerous international cooperation and research assignments funded by International Development Organisations (IDOs) including The World Bank, the European Union, The UN (UNESCO, UNIDO, UNWTO), the Commonwealth Secretariat, the millennium Challenge Corporation as well as National Ministries, Tourism Boards, Regional Development Agencies and NGOs. Such work has provided the basis of very impactful work (see: REF2014 and REF2021 Impact Case Studies). Examples of other projects undertaken by her are available here.   

Amongst her most recent achievements are:  

- 2023: Selected Member of The World Economic Forum Global Future Council for Sustainable Development;

- 2022: Elected Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism;  

- 2021: Appointed Alternate Member of the UNWTO World Committee on Tourism Ethics (2021-2025); and  

- 2018 to 2021: served as UK national Research Exercise Framework (REF2021) panelist for UOA C24: Sport, Tourism and Leisure.  

She is known globally for her excellence in leading and collaborating with multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder and multi-cultural teams and for her commitment to generating new knowledge on ways in which tourism can play a key role in sustainable development by stimulating local economies, conserving the environment, developing peoples and changing lives.  

Her research spans across 3 main areas, including:   

- Sustainable Tourism Development for Resilient Communities - i.e., the complexity of tourism development in the Global South; niche (tourism) product development; the impact of heath crisis on tourism communities (Ebola, COVID); healthy lifestyle tourism clusters; Local, National and IDOs' interventions for resilient communities; travel philanthropy.  

- Innovation, responsible entrepreneurship and sustainability in tourism - i.e. British Council project on Innovationa for African Universities;  circular economy, contemporary arts and community development, contemporary arts for sustainable development in Africa.  

- Policy, Planning and Governance - i.e., master-planning; training needs analysis and capacity building; responsible leadership; participatory and community centered development. 

Jo is a visual artist and designer who's practice and research is concerned with communication, collaboration and engagement - in particular, how inclusive arts strategies can connect people from diverse backgrounds.

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. 

Caterina Radvan is Academic Programme Leader for the Fashion & Textiles programme and a Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton where she specializes in teaching knitwear and textile design.  For many years her practice-based research has focused on the exploitation of knitting and spinning technology to develop fashion knitwear through an empirical approach to design.  Her PhD thesis is entitled 'Inclusive Design Solutions for Womenswear through Advanced Industrial Knitting Technology'.  This encompassed extensive empirical research into user-centred design.  Her commercial knitwear design work includes an extended collaboration with the design label Shirin Guild and collaborations with artists including the sculptor Maria Blaisse and the dancer Rajyashree Ramamurthi. 

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

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:

• Health Counts: A city wide health survey of Brighton & Hove
• 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.
• Health4LGBTI; Italy and UK health professional training for psychiatry.
• 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:

• 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:

• Investigating the impact of Covid-19 on local communities within East Sussex.
• A review of alcohol use amongst gender and sexual minorities
• 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

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. 

Recognised as an artist working primarily in drawing and print, Emma Stibbon’s practice investigates the histories and geological narratives of place. She has established her reputation through an international exhibition profile and a series of residencies and awards.

Emma’s research examines both natural processes and the impact of human endeavor on place, recognizing both are related. Drawn to places that put a perspective on the viewer, her practice as an artist is preoccupied with environments that are in a condition of change or flux. Whether this is the seismic forces of geologically changing landscape or retreating glaciers and ice shelves, her subjects are connected by their sense of scale or drama. Emma examines how the apparently monumental can be so fragile as well as how the appearance of a place can retain the structures and patterns of its evolution. Her response often leads to a fluid understanding of geography, culture, politics and memory.

Fundamental to Emma’s research is how drawing can act as a means of communicating our relationship to a changing environment. Through her investigation of location, Emma aims to convey the frailty of both human experience and the graphic ‘touch’ of drawing. The mediation of image through process is a key part of Emma’s enquiry. Her methods for gathering on-site material include direct observational drawing and photography. Walking and orientating in the field is preliminary to her recording observed forms.

Drawing is fundamental to her work, a primary concern for her is the correspondence between ideas, process and place. Through her use of fragile drawing media, process, composition, and scale Emma's work invites the viewer to reflect on our relationship to an inherently fragile and rapidly changing world.  Her approach to drawing opens up new ways of thinking about and reflecting on environment by complicating and enriching our understanding of landscape as a pictorial genre.

She has taken part in several international residencies including the Artist Placement in Antarctica, organised by the Scott Polar Research Institute (2013); the Arctic Circle.org expedition to Svalbard in the High Arctic (2013); Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut (2016); Artist in Residence at Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park (2016); Project Pressure Grand Canyon National Parks Artist in Residence (2017), Death Valley National Park Arts Foundation (2019), and the Queen Sonja/Artica Svalbard Print Award, Svalbard (2019).

Emma has recently exhibited her work at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London; Galerie Bastian, Berlin; Earth Gallery, University of Bristol; Eres Stiftung, Munich; the New Art Gallery, Walsall;  the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne; The Polar Museum, Cambridge, the Royal Academy, London; Potsdam Kunstverein and Museum of Contemporary Art, Hangzhou, China. Her work is held in private and public collections including the Stadtmuseum, Berlin; Potsdam Museum; the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; New Art Gallery, Walsall; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery; Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth; and the V&A, London.

I am a principal lecturer in physiotherapy in the School of 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. 

Ben's work is situated in the fields of cybernetics, systemic design, and architectural theory, with focuses on ethics, place, methodology, and transdisciplinarity.

Together with Sally Sutherland and Tom Ainsworth, Ben is co-founder of the Radical Methodologies Research Group, which explores counter-conventional approaches to research and practice within varied contexts.

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

Current Supervision

Farrelly, Liz. Making a museum: Documenting change at the Design Museum, London, 1979 to 2016

Abbas, Shahid. Agency in Generative Design

My research interests include 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.

#TheDarkSideOfOccupation

The Dark Side of Occupation is a concept I created and am working on developing. 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 resilience, 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

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 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.

Simonne holds both Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) registration as a Senior Biomedical Scientist and a Fellow for the Higher Education Academy.  Drawing on 20 years of multidisciplinary pathology experience she has worked in both the NHS and private sector. Over four years she has divided her time between biomedical science practice and lecturing for University of Brighton (UoB). Now as a full-time academic, Simonne is module lead for Clinical Placement in NHS pathology laboratories and has redesigned the biomedical science training programme that has been praised by Institute Biomedical Science (IBMS) professional body for its ability to withstand COVID-19 pandemic pressures and support trainees through turblent and uncertain working environments. 

In 2021, together with her research partner, was awarded a NHSBT research grant to form an interdisciplinary team who are passionate about promoting a better understanding of the complexities that surround organ donation and transplantation pathway. Drawing on successful education pilot studies the research team are offering student researchers to co-design and co-deliver education events to tackle the health inequalities experienced by the Black and South Asian communities who rely on the low supply of ethnically-matched donated organs for successful transplantations. 

Simonne has a wide scope of research interests:

• Covid-19 Research team with Universities of Oxford, Glasgow, Shefield and Lincoln who are building on the success of a published work which uses artificial intelligence to help the early detection of coronavirus.
• In science communications she was awarded the opportunity to be one of the biomedical advisors for a Wellcome Trust funded research project titled ‘Blood Culture’ (https://www.blood-culture.com/credits.html).
• Simonne is the principle researcher on a NHSBT Community Investment Scheme funded project whose project is one of the 35 community projects in England that have received a share of £600,000 funding as part of the Government’s commitment to tackle health inequalities in Black and Asian communities. More info follow https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/donorresearch/
• As a practicing biomedical science for the private and public sector, Simonne is interested in developing and evaluating quality improvement interventions within the patient-care pathway that involve multi-disciplinary teams that ultimately improve health outcomes for patients. Specifically, there is call for more action in reducing the errors that occur during the transfusion pathway as indicated by the latest SHOT (Serious Hazards of Transfusion) report.
• Simonne has also completed an intensive realist methodology training at the Centre for Advancement in Realist Evaluation and Synthesis and will conducting collaborative research for publication.

Avril Wilson’s art practice research incorporates an expanded approach to drawing that connects diverse aspects of her work through the use of different materials and mediums, including metalworking.

Avril’s key research themes of identity and place, personal histories and notions of perceived and physical boundaries are explored through both site-based work and drawings. In her work she investigates material meaning, craft, maps and landscape.

A recurring concern with points of access and boundaries can be seen across Avril’s public commissioned work and her gallery exhibitions. For example, in 2000 Avril was commissioned (with artist Bruce Williams) to create a 400 meter long sculptural railing and gateways for The Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. It replaced a security wall that was erected between the hospital and the Falls Road during ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Entitled ‘Life Span’ the railings represent a celebration of life. Having grown up in Belfast the site for this commission was very significant to Avril both politically and personally. The piece prompted a gradual but profound change in the way Avril thought about and made work and marked the beginning of a new, experimental way of working. 

Avril explores ideas around identity and place, reflecting on the physical and personal relationships we hold between one place and another and creating a psychogeographic perspective. This focuses in particular on her relationship with the city of Belfast and Northern Ireland. 

In 2013, two solo exhibitions ‘Somewhere’ (University of Chichester) and ‘Threshold’ (Belfast, Northern Ireland) connect a series of images and objects that explore aspects of Northern Ireland, post the Good Friday Agreement. Concepts of perceived and physical boundaries in relation to maps and landscape are important in this work. Social divisions created within the topography of the city and the point from which a landscape is viewed also come into play.

The notion of ‘no-mans-land’ as a paradoxical place of exclusion and shared access is considered in a series of collaged images and material interventions focused on closed ‘peace-line’ checkpoints. In other work originating from ‘interface’ roads in Belfast themes around duality are explored and through a series of images taken from the edge of a hillside on the outskirts of the city, record the first view of the city Avril grew up in from a viewpoint which for many years was restricted from public access and used for security surveillance.

This body of work was initiated through an intensive period of material and process experimentation which looked at the physicality and association of various materials in relation to image. Avril’s processes of inquiry include drawing, photography and making 3D objects, exploring materials such as metal, soot, graphite and oil paint, and revealing image between layers through processes like tracing, cutting and piercing. Ideas of residue and emergence emerge from process, extending the possibility of meaning in the work.

Experimenting through materials and working with hand-making processes is an important aspect of Avril’s art practice research and also underpins her pedagogic practice. A CETLD research project, ‘See What Happens - the value of creative experimentation through materials’ (Cousens, Wilson. 2009), set out to analyse and evaluate the role of experimentation through materials in the creative designing and making of three dimensional objects and artefacts and to strengthen its place within the Higher Education curricula in Art and Design.

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 Co-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 is the 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. 

Contemporary art champions, SMEs productivity and tourism development in West-Africa: Looking beyond the commercial value of the “artefact”.

My study will identify 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 aims at developing 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.

Rebecca Atkinson is a Neurologic Music Therapist and Doctoral researcher with the University of Brighton. Alongside directing Chiltern Music Therapy she is part of the therapy and research team, and her main focus of work is in paediatric brain injury, neurodegenerative conditions, acute care and community rehabilitation.

Under an Arts Council scholarship, Rebecca’s PhD research project is investigating the impact of music and speech for those diagnosed with childhood dementia. Her continued collaboration and affiliation with UK and European research institutions, sees Rebecca at the forefront of current and pioneering research in the arts, health and music therapy sector.

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.

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.

My research explores interdisciplinary representations of silence in traumatised women’s testimony, where silence acts as a protective mechanism. Gathering lost and silenced stories of Cypriot lacemakers and building on emerging feminist theory which positions silence as a rhetoric of the deliberately unspoken, I intend to develop a community pedagogy to witness silence, including how gaps may be heard, shared, and ultimately encourage voice. Just like the deliberate creation of holes, a defining feature of the lace, these silences are often intentional; conscious gaps embedded into the fabric of a story. ‘Lefkaritika’ is a style of lacemaking unique to rural Cyprus, where my paternal family is from. It inspired the tablecloth in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and in 2009 was inscribed onto the United Nation’s ‘List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’, in recognition of its international significance and immediate threat to its survival.

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.

Ada Xiaoyu Hao (b. 1993) is a performance artist-researcher whose practice engages fiction, techno-biographical inquiries, multimedia technology and philosophy with performance. She currently focuses on creating a theoretical framework that uses performance as the main methodological formulation to develop a series of processual, participatory and intersubjective engagements with the immanent possibility of being and becoming through role-playing. Probing the boundaries between fact and fiction while playing with the ambiguous relationship between the documentation and the performance as the common thread in her practice, she suggests a speculative envisaging of the concept of the self in a post-humanistic vision that challenges our perception of becoming, adaption, and sustainability. She is currently finishing a practice-based Ph.D. in Doctoral School of Art & Communication, at the University of Brighton, titled: A Production of Multiple Becomings of Subjectivity, supervised by Professor Paul Sermon and Professor Duncan Bullen.

H's PhD explores the ways trans people experience sex. Trans is commonly understood as misalignment between the sexed physical attributes of the body, and one’s internal sense of gender. Medical and social discourses make use of the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative to produce an understanding of trans experience as psycho-pathology (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) that renders trans experiences of fucking as problematic, static, and fixed. This project instead shows trans people are a heterogeneous populous who experience gender, sexuality, and bodies in myriad ways. The project weaves together my autophenomenoghraphic personal experiences as a trans sexual agent, alongside intimate and creative encounters with six other self-identified trans people to generate ‘data’ which illuminates the diverse and complex ways in which we experience sex and sexuality.  Trans bodies and sexualities are navigated using a variety of tools: the use of language to reframe materiality, temporary and permanent bodily modifications, intention-setting and the queer act of asking to be seen, and of alternative sexual practices such as BDSM, tantra, and roleplay, for example. The findings generated will make visible alternatives to the hegemonic discourse of being ‘born in the wrong body’ and demonstrate tools and practices which mediate trans sexual embodiment. This may inform services for trans people, updating therapeutic discourses within psychotherapy and trans healthcare, and may serve as an empowering experience for those involved. Positioned within Trans Studies, which since its inception is a transdisciplinary field, this project challenges binarist debates within queer, feminist and psychology scholarship. The New Materialist concept of ‘assemblages’ eschews the essentialist/constructionist impasse by attending to both the material body with all its felt subjectivity, and the cultural and discursive production of bodily intelligibility, not as distinct categories, but as interdependent, dynamic and reciprocal processes.

My PhD research looks at the queer affects, practices and relations found in rural areas, and is based in both the School of Humanities and the School of Environment and Technology at the University of Brighton.

Academic understandings of sexuality often privilege urban centres as places where queer sex flourishes, which builds the assumption that sex must be visible and performed in order to be understood. My research challenges this metronormative link between ‘urbanity’ and ‘sex’. Instead, I explore ‘grey’, less-visible areas between sexual and non-sexual, somewhere and nowhere, and assert the queerness of non-metropolitan, ‘green’ areas.

My research interests can be categorised into 3 areas, all of which I approach using queer theory:

Asexualities and Nonsexualities

What can asexual people, communities and experiences teach us about sex, sexuality, desire and gender? Asexual people do not experience sexual attraction to others. Their livelihoods, perspectives and politics can therefore help us to critique systems of social and sexual control, like compulsory heterosexuality for example. I am interested in exploring the relations that people who do not experience sexual attraction have to 'sex' as a social function of power.

I'm also interested in understanding 'nonsexual' ways of being, and uncovering their radical politics. Unlike asexuality, all people engage with nonsexual ways of relating and feeling. What happens when we understand friendship, romance or even loneliness as nonsexualities?

Rural Queer Studies

The countryside is often seen as a place that lacks queerness, or at least opportunities through which to live queerly. Even so, many queer people continue to live in rural areas. In fact, non-metropolitan space plays host to some very deviant and dissident sexualities and experiences, whose queerness remains underappreciated.

I'm currently researching how one can respond to this tendency, and am doing so by studying queer relations, affects and identities in one rural area in SW England. I question the dominance of 'lack' and 'absence' in defining rural queer space, and am working towards new ways on conceptualising 'rural queer'.

Feminist, Queer, Spatial and Critical Theory

My interest in theory is wide-ranging but is most powerfully informed by queer theory. My research attempts to queer concepts and learn from the margins, but it is also informed by intersectional and abolitionist feminist thinking, as well as poststructural and postmodern understandings of space, place and philosophy. As such my research has previously engaged with: Butler, Foucault, Haraway, Massey, Halperin, Sedgwick, Halberstam, Ahmed, Lorde, Deleuze and Guattari.

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 current research interest is transformative storytelling in one transnational family - contesting populist bordered notions of identity whilst navigating shifting socio-political contexts. Adopting an autoethnographic approach, combined with oral histories and narrative inquiry, I aim to create a digital oral history collection to be housed with the British Library Sound archive that documents alternative narratives, contesting prevailing nationalist narratives in the UK, France and the US. 

My research is in the state of flow and transcendence in the experience of screendance. This is a PaR research and my body of work will be mainly in film and visual arts, featuring movement and dance, and predominantly concerned with the felt creative experience, its transference and interconnection between artist as filmmaker and performer and the implications for the viewer.

My creative practice thesis, 'Reclaiming cabaret. A queer haunted autoethnography of real, researched and imagined stories of cabaret past and present,' is in two parts. The creative element 'Blond Angel' 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 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. 

I am a second year PhD researcher critically exploring green social prescribing as a solution to racialised inequalities in access to nature and health in England.

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. 

My current research is practice-based, working towards the development of a collection of poetic writing that contributes to the current cultural and artistic movement challenging speciesist and anthropocentric ideologies as part of a wider response to the current climate crisis.

My theoretical interests are in how poetry and experimental forms of writing can help to challenge patriarchal and anthropocentric hegemony, in particular how these ideologies relate to the language of oppositional binarism. This is largely informed by psychoanalytic feminism, specifically the work of Helene Cixous, and by ecofeminist understandings of the human/nature binary, and how these categories might intersect with other binarisms both within and outside of the academy. As part of this, I am exploring the political and intellectual significance of hybrid forms of writing, particularly those that can be defined as both critical and creative. 

My research utilises a walking methodology that is accountable to decolonial, feminist, and queer theories, as a way of decentering the human as well as Eurocentric, heteronormative, and masculinist knowledges.

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. 

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 an artist, writer and researcher based in North Herefordshire, UK. My creative interests use photography to explore the relationship between humans and the natural world through a research-based practice. Inspired the by increased popularity in the concept of plant-intelligence, particularly in a world in which climate concern and anxiety is an ever increasing norm, I use traditional and alternative modes of photography to interrogate how humans conceptualise the plant-kingdom through mythological, scientific and cultural practices. 

This is specifically explored in my part-time, practice-based PhD project titled ‘Photosymbiosis: Towards a Photographic Method of Collaboration with England's Heritage Oak Trees’, which uses traditional and alternative modes of photographic practice to examine the role of twelve heritage oak trees, through the lens of scientific research that considers the agency and intelligence of plants. By involving the oak tree within the creative process, whether through its material (its soil, bark, or leaves, for example) or biological functions, my practice seeks to (re)centre the plant as a sensual being, while also acknowlodging certain tree's status as a cultural object, imbued with emotional, social, cultural, and political value that raise certain plants to heritage status.

Alterntatively, my written work often uses queer experiences of gender and sexuality, through the use of poetry and short-form prose, to investigate human relationships, relationships to place and personal events.

My practice-based doctoral research uses design to observe, engage and intervene in contemporary UK public breastfeeding discourses. This research focuses on gender, care, food, culture and motherhood and critically examines the role of design in relation to complex issues of sustainability.

My work explores counter-conventional approaches to research and practice across design and health disciplines. I am interested in how design can create meaningful dialogue using critical thinking and designed artefacts. 

My research interests are Radical methodologies, Design Culture(s), Design Anthropology; Research Through Design; Design for social change; Design and sustainability; Intersectional feminist design agency; How design can positively impact health inequalities; The impact of design on everyday life, behaviours, norms, practices and belief systems. 

My recent interests are design(ing) for peace and intersecting issues of justice, and how the discipline of design reinforces gender based violence and oppressive class politics.

https://twitter.com/ahrcpress/status/1212358091917971456

Together with Ben Sweeting and Tom Ainsworth I am a co-founder of the Radical Methodologies Research and Enterprise Group. Please see the blog for further information on the group.

My interests are broadly focused on creative writing, though with an inter-disciplinary perspective. My primary focus within creative writing is fiction. And the topic currently holding much of my attention is unreadability as associated with narrative fiction. 

I am a doctoral research who is interested relationality in the context of mental health. My current research project explores intimate relationships, sexuality and desire in early psychosis and recovery. This is a qualitative, interdisciplinary project situated within psychology, sociology and social policy. I am informed by a hermeneutic phenommenological approach and utilise creative methodologies, aiming to improve understandings of what it's like to live with mental health conditions. 

I am also particularly interested in decolonisation, both in terms decolonising education as well as in relation to my research around sexuality and mental health.

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