Who we are

Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, Course Leader (MSc Clinical Pharmacy).

My role is to develop teaching, scholarship and research related to pharmacy practice. I study safe and effective use of medicines. For full publications, see https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/ravina-barrett/publications/ or https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=hGQ8ca0AAAAJ or ORCID profile.

Alternate Vice Chair of Research Ethics Committees (RECs) leading Clinical Trials review: I led the UK reviewer for the Ramdesivier trial which is the first drug licensed for use in the COVID-19 pandemic globally. I have been a NHS REC Member since Nov 2015 and have personally reviewed over 300+ studies including Clinical Trials of an Investigational Medicinal Product (CTIMP) or device as the chair, lead or second reviewer, within the studies reviewed by the committee.

• Recognised Key Opinion Leader with industry (collaboration with Ipsen pharma). My publications have attracted industry collaboration, leading to real world evidence research publications and conference presentation, bringing energy and innovation to old therapeutic areas. Abstract and poster are due to be presented at EMUC 2022 entitled “Medication adherence among patients with prostate cancer prescribed luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone agonists in England: Primary results from a real-world, retrospective cohort study" with IPSEN.
• Awareness of NHS decision-making and workflow processes (clinical trials pharmacist experience).
• Deep understanding of statistical and data analytics (see extensive Real World Evidence publication record) used to analyse prescription medication use/coverage nationally.
• Extensive Health Research Authority Ethics Committee (acting Alt-Chair) experience of providing favourable ethical opinions for large commercial trials. I help companies and research teams design scientifically and ethically robust work within industry and academia. Experience of working with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in this capacity. Have reviewed regulatory documents from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA).
• Financial education and experience of managing budgets within community pharmacy and hospital teams e.g.,site set up and costings.

Kevin Biderman has been working as an artist, theorist and lecturer for the past 20 years. He previously taught Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art and film-making at Goldsmiths, in addition to lecturing in Further Education. In 2005 he co-authored the book Londres en Mouvement and has more recently written for the Journal of Visual Culture amongst others. In 2017 he undertook an AHRC-funded research residency at the MayDay Rooms archive. Kevin has a socially engaged practice and works with numerous activist groups and unions. In 2020 he completed his doctoral thesis at the RCA titled “Visual Surveillance and Direct Action Protest in the City of London.”

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.

My research draws on media studies, critical theory, cultural studies, and science and technology studies.  I have conducted ethnographic research into the use of new media technologies such as iPads and other tablet computers, by scientists working in fields such as chemistry, genetics, neuroscience and biology. My research focuses on everyday practices related to digital media, and seeks to critique ways in which media technologies are involved in the production and maintenance of identities. I also examine ways in which new media technologies such as Virtual Reality, Immersive Tech and 5G come to be defined in certain ways - as good, bad, exciting, dangerous or perhaps all of these things at once. 

My current research is in the area of machine learning, including both mathematical foundations and applications. Prediction with expert advice and topological data analysis are my main topics of interest. 

Prediction with expert advice is a paradigm for sequential forecasting that studies how one can merge predictions from different sources when reliability of these sources needs to be inferred from the predictions themselves. This paradigm is close to online bandits and related to many other machine learning techniques, from ridge regression to boosting. I am particularly interested in direct applications for prediction with expert advice algorithms.

Topological data analysis is a relatively recent but already mature area of machine learning that tries to apply notions from topology, a highly abstract branch of pure mathematics, to finding patterns in point clouds. Currently, I am working mostly on expressing topological data analysis ideas in the form of kernels inducing a reproducing kernel Hilbert space structure on data.

I am also remaining interested in the developments in both of my original research areas: algorithmic information theory / Kolmogorov complexity and constructive logical semantics.

Dr Lance Dann is a Senior Lecturer in Audio and Digital Media, and is a multi-awarding winning producer of radio programs and podcasts. His works has included writing radio dramas and producing and presenting documentaries for the BBC, designing theatrical sound at The Wooser Group, and in 2017 creating the critically acclaimed audio thriller series Blood Culture

In my current research, I contribute to academic and public understanding of how technology, data and information can be used in organisational and policy contexts to support the interests of citizens, communities, public service professionals and governments. I have studied and evaluated a range of digital health services and technologies including electronic patient records, data dashboards, visualisation tools and mobile phone technologies in a range of different health settings.  I also have research interests in fuel poverty and community innovation in the field of energy justice.

I am co-investigator on the Horizon 2020 project EmERGE (€5.5 million) in which partners from five EU countries have developed a mHealth platform, which includes a smartphone application, to support people living with HIV. In that project I contribute to a Workpackage on ‘Sociotechnical Evaluation and Codesign’ in which we have introduced a process to facilitate the coproduction of the platform with clinicians and people living with HIV.  Our approach was selected as an exemplar of HIV-related, social science research at the World AIDS conference 2018.  I also lead a Workpackage on ‘Innovation and Commercialisation’ in which I am responsible for ensuring the sustainability of the EmERGE technology after the end of the project through the creation of a digital health Community Interest Company. 

In addition, I carry out research with Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations, policymakers, commissioners and infrastructure organisations who take action and provide services for people in need of support. I founded the Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Partnership which provides training and support to VCS organisations through our partner Community Works. Findings from this partnership work have been included in Brighton and Hove’s Social Value Framework and Guide and in the City’s Fairness Commission Report. They have also informed the Communities and Third Sector Commission (£2.2 million) evaluation and the 5-yearly social and economic audit of the third sector in Brighton and Hove ‘Taking Account 4’.

My specialism is in qualitative research methods and my theoretical interests are in Science and Technology Studies in particular Actor-Network Theory and related 'practice-based' approaches, and complexity theory. I was co-investigator on an ESRC seminar series entitled New Practices for New Publics in which I facilitated civil society and academic partners to pursue theoretical interests in ‘practice’.

My research interests have a business and technology focus with a core theme being the impact of new technologies on business models as well as the broader socio-economic environment.

I am particularly interested in the ways that information is used by organisations as a source of competitive advantage and innovation. Over the last decade I have been on the organising committee of the European Conference Series on eGovernment (ECEG) and presented and reviewed papers as well as chaired sessions at these events. More recently I joined the organising committee of the European Conference Series on Social Media (ECSM). Being involved with these events has brought me into contact with many academics from around the world and led to my current interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) and business model innovation.

I am currently working on a research project to better understand the business models being developed and deployed by data-driven enterprises across a range of sectors.

Current research projects:

• The information business;
• Data-driven business models.

Previous research projects:

• Information literacy;
• Public sector data exploitation.

Natalie combines epidemiological methods for health services research with a critical approach and qualitative methods. Her interests include the interface between sexual and reproductive health with psychosocial issues, public health, community delivery of sexual health interventions, Point of Care Testing for STIs, problematic substance use and anti-microbial resistance (AMR). Methodologically she is interested in screening tool development, clinical prediction modelling, development and evaluation of complex interventions, the evaluation of public involvement in research, and researching disenfranchised populations. Natalie has been developing a critical epidemiology approach to sexual health research and more recently Trauma and Resilience Informed Research Principles and Practice (TRIRPP). You can read more about TRIRPP here http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/trirpp/.

Sanaz's research interests include human-centred development of new technologies that incorporate studies of user's experiences, cognition and collaboration in designing a novel intelligent systems delivered via multiple platforms: mobile devices, interactive television, tag-based technologies, wearable technologies, and robotic interactions. Some related themes of her research include Human Computer Interaction, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), User’s Modelling and Adaptation, Human Robotic Interactions, Intelligent Interaction Modelling, Data Analytic and Sentiment Analysis, Artificial Intelligence Ethics for Development of Human Centred AI-based Systems.

Key Research Themes:

• Human Computer Interaction (HCI),
• Artificial Intelligence (AI),
• User Experience (UX),
• Machine Learning (ML)

Current Research & Development Projects:

•  Artificial Intelligence Ethics:  Development of Evidence-based, Empirical-based Ethical Guidelines for Design and Development of AI-based Systems.

• Evaluation and testing of Sport Technologies, factor including usability and beyond usability, including brain/cognitive performance using EEG devices. The project aims to develop a set of guidelines for sport tech industry to incorporate in design of human centred technologies, to maximise usability, and beyond usability, i.e. efficiency, effectiveness, user satisfaction, and cognitive performance. 

• Research project with University of São Paulo, Universito of Chile, Es el Senor Vagner de Sousa Beserra. Colaboración Internacional para el desarrollo de la Televisión Digital Terrestre Educativa en Chile - to develop an International consortium to explore a potential of educational application for digital television (DTV).

• Sentiment Analysis and Data Mining of Educational Application from Twitter, University of Portsmouth, and Edge Hill University.

• Empirical study to investigate and evaluate Human Robotic Interaction, mainly aspects of usability in terms of, technology acceptances, efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction.

• User-centred development of Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT), in collaboration of Brighton and Sussex Medical School.

• Smart ambient – development of location based informal learning through mobile and ubiquitous technologies in collaboration of University of Portsmouth and University of Al-Mustansiriyah.

• Brain Computer Interface (BCI): Experimental study to evaluate cognitive loads and performances of users using technologies in edutainment and digital well-being (in particular, mobile apps and wearable technologies)

Zoe is a Developmental Psychologist interested in language learning and the acquisition of early literacy skills in a variety of contexts.

Research includes investigations into early language acquisition such as how children learn words from shared reading interactions. This has included looking at the effects of different book formats, illustrations and reading styles on language and literacy acquisition using a variety of experimental methods. Other research has investigated parent-child shared reading interactions with different book formats, and home learning for children across a range of ages. Current projects investigate the effects of different media types on emergent literacy skills using eye tracking technology, and consider the role of the body and affect in children's learning.

Zoe's research also includes community projects with home educating families in the South of England, and investigations into how learning environments (including online learning) support the timely acquisition of literacy skills, broader "life skills" and wellbeing.

Zoe is a keen advocate of Open Scholarship (Open Science), and shares resources, code and analyses on the Open Science Framework.  Zoe leads Brighton's ReproducibiliTea journal club for Open Science Advocates and is local network lead for the UK Reproducibility Network.

Dr Fotaris's research interests focus on the integration of technology in teaching and learning, particularly in the use and pedagogic potential of games, escape rooms, generative artificial intelligence, and virtual/augmented environments in educational settings. A representative list of research interests is the following:

• Educational Escape Rooms
• Game-Based Learning / Gamification / Location-based Games / Alternate Reality Games
• Generative Artificial Intelligence
• Augmented / Virtual Reality
• User Experience (UX)
• Design Thinking
• Cybersecurity

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

Theo’s specialising on Digital Nursing and Digital Health.

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

In particular, his research focuses on the following areas:

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

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

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

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

Recent and ongoing projects include:

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

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.”  

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.

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 research investigates how people attend to CCTV footage, particularly when instructed to focus on specific features in the footage and witnessing different severity of crimes. This research is important as CCTV footage is used as evidence in court, however, very little is known about the behavioural characteristics of the CCTV observer, and the strategies applied by observers when visually attending to CCTV footage.

I am trained in using a range of eye trackers and have integrated eye tracking technology into many research projects, including tracking people’s eyes as they observe CCTV footage. Eye-tracking technology is a growing field used to detect eye movements and analyse human processing of visual information in both the lab and in natural environments. The data is innovative and informative, allowing researchers a unique insight into how we attend to and understand the world around us.

My other research interests include:

• Online deviance and cybercrime
• Forensic risk assessments
• Psychological impact of crime
• Change blindness

I have a broad interest and expertise in the application of technology to support people with their mental health and wellbeing. My work to date has focused on the safety, acceptability and effectiveness of digital interventions such as computerised CBT and mental health apps using concepts from counselling, attachment theory, human-computer interaction.

Current research project:

Experiences of following therapists on social media - https://www.researchgate.net/project/Experiences-of-following-therapists-as-mental-health-influencers-on-social-media

Previous research projects:

• BlueIce: Smartphone app for young people who self-harm and attend Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/blueice/
• Lifeguide: Software platform for internet interventions  https://www.lifeguideonline.org/

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

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

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

Specific Themes:

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

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

Wider Interests:

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

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

I am particularly interested in issues to do with digital capabilities and curriculum design, especially the interface between pedagogy, quality assurance, governance and technological issues. At the moment I’m undertaking research into student technology ambassadors, virtual reality, and the use of technology in learning and teaching practices. I continue to research and publish in my subject area of heritage and archaeology.

My early research was in the area of Human Computer Interaction and explored older people's appropriation of digital technologies, considering issues of accessibility in relation to the ageing process. This continues to be an area of interest for me with my research focusing on different technologies (from online communities, social media, mobile phones and video games) as well as looking at the different motivations that underpin this technological involvement (e.g. intergenerational connections, sense of community, adaptations to ageing, etc.). My current research in this area is looking at older's people's susceptibility to online scams. More recently I have been developing research in the area of Cyberpsychology which focuses on the human relationship with digital technology at a psychological (rather than design) level. Here I am interested in the way that everyday digital interactions come to shape our experience of the world, ourselves and other people. My current research in this area focuses on smartphone dependency as an existential concern and the notion of 'digital mindfulness'. My approach to research is informed by my background in HCI and user experience and as such emphasises understandings of technology use that are grounded in an appreciation of subjectivity and social context.  

My work takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on sociology, social psychology, gender studies, education, and cultural studies. I use feminist and creative methodologies and discourse analysis to explore power and inequality in everyday life. My research explores sexualities, gender, class, borders, youth cultures, media representation and consumption, social media and popular culture.

My current research includes research with Olu Jenzen, Carl Bonner-Thompson and Jane Melvin on LGBTQ digital youth work, a project on LGBTQI+ people's experiences in immigration detention and an archive project on sex advice in zines.

Previous work has included working as a researcher on an NSPCC-funded project on youth sexting, an ESRC-funded project on youth aspiration and celebrity culture and an ESRC-funded project on long-term couple relationships. I have co-authored two academic books – one on celebrity and youth aspiration (with Heather Mendick, Kim Allen and Aisha Ahmad) and one on sex advice in media culture (with Meg-John Barker and Rosalind Gill).

My most recent book is a graphic book with Sarah Leaney and Danny Noble which was published in 2022 - Class: A Graphic Guide.

Olu Jenzen is Reader in Media Studies and the Director of the Research Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender. Her research focuses on Digital Culture and Activism, and LGBTQ+ Media Cultures, in particular global visual activism and LGBTQ+ social media youth cultures. She is the co-editor of The Aesthetics of Protest: Global Visual Culture and Communication (AUP, 2020) and a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, on 'Global Queer and Feminist Visual Activism’ (2022). She has published in journals such as Convergence; Gender, Place and Culture and Social Movement Studies. Advocating socially engaged, human-centred research across both digital media research and gender and sexuality research, her work with young people is participatory and embedded in community environments. She currently leads two projects, a pilot study on LGBTQ+ Digital Youth Work and the Gender Creativity and Community project, researching the impact of community belonging on gender-diverse young people’s wellbeing.

I am interested in critical noise theory and novel approaches to analysing the political agency of contemporary art practices. My research methods are interdisciplinary, spanning critical theory, philosophy, and a range of art practices—including performance, installation, and film. I am currently completing an arts practice-based PhD at The University of Brighton.

My Ed D research focused on digital technologies as mediators of youth work practice, and I am still really interested in how digital tools and remote learning possibilities can be used within informal education contexts. Of particular interest is the development of digital hybrid pedagogies for educators, and how the digital world impacts on young people, youth culture and identity formation.

I am also very interested in work-based learning and its enabling properties for part-time, mature learners whether in HE, or other learning contexts.

My research sits at the intersection of cultural studies, computer science, and philosophy. Responding to the penetration of digital media and technology into contemporary computational culture, the core question driving my current research is a critical reinterpretation of the philosophical legacy of phenomenology with a view to developing a renewed post-phenomenology of technology capable of responding to the spread of artificial intelligence in contemporary computational culture. The philosophical and political implications of this line of enquiry is directed towards an intervention into the discourse around politics of technology and the construction of meaning in a digital society. I also write and think about software, ecology, decolonialism, and aesthetics.

"If you must choose one single idea to work on for the rest of your life, what will that be ?"

In 2003, my grandma passed away with severe dementia. At the time, there was no existing technology to help communicating her daily needs, or her whereabouts for the carer to attend to swiftly. It was a struggle for my family to provide her the end-of-life care that she deserved.

For the past decade, my research has been around navigation and tracking, with an emphasis on contact tracing and healthcare monitoring. I have developed novel, practical systems combining the ubiquitous mobile sensors with machine learning.

Since 2017, I have published on average 3 papers, journals a year, most of them as the lead author. See here for a full list of my publications.

Reviewer for:

• IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC).
• IEEE Access Journal.
• IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (J-SAC).
• Pattern Recognition Journal, Elsevier.
• Journal of Information and Telecommunication, Taylor & Francis.
• ACM Journal on Interactive, Multimedia, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT).
• Symposium on Conformal and Probabilistic Prediction with Applications.
• Journal of Location Based Services, Taylor & Francis.
• Sensors Journal, MDPI.
• International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, MDPI.

My main area of research is the sociology of death and dying - my current research projects are exploring  the experiences of those returning to work after a bereavement and examining differences in end of life rituals due to the Covid 19 pandemic. 

Latest article: Teaching Death to Undergraduates: Exploring the Student Experience of Discussing Emotive Topics in the University Classroom' in Educational Review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Southall’s core research interests include the potential for the manipulation of open-source software tools to provide specific learning outcomes or experiences.

He is actively engaged in the incorporation of environmental simulation data into virtual design environments. This work has initially centred on the use of the modelling and animation tool Blender as a pre/post-processor for the lighting simulation software Radiance and the building performance simulation softwareEnergyPlus. Radiance and EnergyPlus are powerful and accurate simulation tools which both lack an easy-to-use interface. By creating an intermediary interface called the VI-Suitewithin Blender, with the scripting language Python and based upon Blender's scriptable nodes, the geometry and materiality of a scene can be easily created, and the results visualised in-situ. See VI-Suite project website.

In conjunction with this digital approach Ryan Southall is interested in parallel physical processes, for example, the recreation of accurate physical lighting conditions for the illumination of physical models, where there are challenges in reproducing accurate physical simulation of sunlight in a compact and cost-effective way. This investigation of creating physical sunlight conditions with commodity electronics involved collaboration with Glenn Longden-Thurgood.

Dr Southall is also developing innovative physical components for 'Smart' natural ventilation systems. 

Dr Southall's other recent research activities include running the CEBE funded project 'LightLab - Where Environment Meets Design'. This project utilised High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging, which allowed students to capture their own real lighting conditions and then apply them as illumination sources to their virtual models. A journal paper resulted form this project and was published by CEBE Transactions (http://cebe.cf.ac.uk/transactions/index.php).

My research is centred very broadly around the psychological side of migration.

Using a variety of methodologies, the majority of my research focuses on ways to improve relationships between people of different backgrounds, and on improving health and well-being of ethnic and religious minority groups, particularly refugees. I like to explore these topics from a multidisciplinary and policy-focused perspective, for example by investigating how refugee resettlement policies can optimise integration and well-being of refugees. I also explore the link between the use of digital technologies and well-being among refugees. I have conducted research with a variety of majority and minority groups in the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, and Chile.

Dr. Julia Winckler's research sits across multiple strands:

Visual Culture, Photographic Archives

Memory, Migration, Contested Topographies, Exile Studies

Reactivating Archives through Artistic Interventions

Photography and Critical Pedagogy

She is the co-research lead, with Dr. Uschi Klein, for the Visual Culture, History and Memory strand at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories.

https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/cmnh/our-activities/our-academic-themes/visual-culture-history-and-memory/

She is also a member of CMNH's and the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice' steering groups. 

Julia Winckler's research investigates archival traces within the context of collective memory and migration narratives and explores how neglected archival sources have the potential to reveal forgotten histories that can alter our understanding  of the past and present. Through the use of creative and interpretive visual approaches, using photography as a tool to think about historical experience, multiple articulations of memory and meaning are expressed, with the aim of generating new academic knowledge.

The author Ben Okri has described 'the artist [as] a conduit through which lost things are recovered' (2005); and Winckler's research methodology considers archival research as a material, embodied practice. Through extensive investigation in archival collections, material is gathered and a strategy is mapped out.  For her research projects, Winckler usually travels to the sites that hold cultural and historical significance.

Through reactivation and visualisation, using photography as the key medium, past memories are reframed and resituated in the present. Combining an archaeological with a genealogical approach, traces are documented; their significance to the present assessed, as some of the historical functions are lost or no longer important. The genealogical approach necessitates an investigation that starts in the present, a retracing of the journey, that is physical and experimental, setting up encounters and dialogues.

Lost and recovered narratives have been a key theme of Winckler's work to date. Memory and migration narratives of emigration (Two Sisters), exile and loss (Traces), exploration (Retracing Heinrich Barth), displacement (Leaving Atlantis), expedition/peregrination (My Canadian Pilgrimage) and interwar home-making (Fabricating Lureland)  have been visualized and probed using the language of photography. These projects have been disseminated through public exhibitions, at conferences, exhibition catalogue publications and public engagement workshops, as well as informing Winckler's teaching practice.

Over the past twenty years, Winckler has undertaken extensive work with and within communities in Hong Kong, West Africa, Canada and the UK to enable broader access to personal cultural heritage amongst disadvantaged areas and demographics. She has sought to improve inclusivity of knowledge production and to reanimate disconnected or underdeveloped narratives and histories. Oscillating between photographic and archival research, photography is mobilized to reconstruct collective memories and give them a renewed cultural presence.

My research explores ubiquitous computing and machine learning applications in the contexts of education, cultural heritage and public engagement. Taking a human-computer interaction perspective, it investigates issues around awareness, engagement, agency and digital inclusion in pervasive and intelligent computing environments. Visit my profile page to browse current and past projects.

I am a heritage professional with a specialism in Museum Learning and my research is guided by the values of empowerment, agency and collaboration with communities at the centre of the research. 

I am a PhD candidate in the EPSRC funded Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (SEAHA) Centre for Doctoral Training. My doctoral project researches how the affordances of drone technology can facilitate agency in underserved communities, to connect with heritage places, collections and narratives.

I am interested in coproduction and codesign as equitable research practices that address the power imbalances between cultural institutions and left- behind communities; museums and social justice; creative methods in qualitative research; the role of drones and their new aesthetics in the reimagining of human geographies and spacial justice; identity and placemaking.

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.

Sound artist, field recordist and EPSRC funded SEAHA Centre for Doctoral Training interdisciplinary heritage science researcher, exploring audience engagement in mobile immersive audio experiences created at the urban outdoor heritage site of Brunswick Square in Brighton & Hove. Working with industry partner Echoes and heritage partner The Regency Town House to compose public 3D prototype soundscapes experienced through the Echoes mobile application. Research interests in composition, field recording, acoustic ecology, heritage and conservation, and art and design.

My PhD is investigating the use of sleep hygiene to improve sleep indices for female athletes. I am interested in the potential of sleep to enhance performance and in improving the tools available to coaches to monitor and enhance athletes' sleep. 

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.

My PhD research is funded by the ESRC's South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership. The research will investigate the relationship between the consumption of gig-economy goods and services and the social pathology of alienation. The aim is to undertake a comparative study of the UK and Iceland, conducting interviews and focus groups, to illuminate how consumption and alienation within the gig-economy environment is experienced in different societal contexts. 

I am undertaking a practice-based PhD examining the political agency of noise art practices. I am interested in critical noise theory and its potential for aiding novel approaches to the production and analysis of contemporary art. Incorporating a number of strands which emerge from, and often lead back to speculative philosophy, my research aims to elaborate an understanding of the way art practices expand possibility space within the social imaginary. Engaging with recent theories of hyperstition and xenofuturism, my research seeks to contribute a productive assessment of noise, problematising previous thought concerned with notions of transgression.

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 research interests revolve around mostly urban-bound issues of architecture, space, and place, as well as social issues of the advancement of the automotive industry.

My PhD research aims to explore the opinions of key demographic groups on the future of autonomous transport, and to assess the future for underrepresented forms of transport – namely cycling and motorcycling - in an increasingly computer-governed world. It is part of a wider funded project within the School of Applied Social Sciences (University of Brighton) considering the gaps in knowledge present in generational understandings of automobility, and what this means for policy going forward.

My research examines the historic evolution of the social representations of death in public discourse, with particular interest paid to social memory and postmodernist perceptions of death through new media. Death is an inevitable certainty, yet the ways in which we approach and cope with this unescapable process can differ immensely based on our exposure and involvement in community and support groups. In this context, I will be utilising digital ethnography as a means to study and determine the impact social media plays upon coping with death and the ways in which death is imagined, perceived, expressed, and represented. At present, there is a distinct lack of literature exploring the ways in which people cope and understand the ramifications of death through a postmodernist perspective. This research will fill that void and allow for greater awareness of the impact new media has on coping with and perceiving death.

My ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership funded PhD project considers the future of smart meters in the UK, their implications for energy justice and how policy may mitigate potential injustices in the future.

Current research into smart meters has highlighted how policy expects this technology to actively engage end users with their energy consumption, allowing them to make more active choices of energy usage. However, energy usage in the home is often invisible and wrapped up in energy intensive practices. I intend to create a workshop using visual methods to make visible practices surrounding meters and their connection to the wider energy infrastructure. From here, participants will be supported to ideate on potential smart meter futures and begin discussing issues of fairness and justice. Data produced during these workshops will be analysed to consider what policies could be put in place to mitigate potential injustices caused by a smart meter future.

My interdisciplinary practice-based research explores the multimedia potentials of storytelling to approach the articulation of shame in PTSD through synthesising psychological research with theories of narrative, literary analysis and creative practice. My PhD research consists of an online multimedia novel together with critical, theoretical and reflective thesis. It also synthesises creative practice, literary criticism and theory, embodied narrative methodology and multimedia storytelling theory with psychology and neuropsychology PTSD and shame studies.

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

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 PhD research is funded by the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership.  I am investigating the outcomes for TV participants who feature in mental health interventions within factual television programmes.  This could be therapy such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or other activities like exercise, singing or decluttering. Examples of these kinds of programmes include The Vertigo Road Trip (BBC1) and The Hoarder Next Door (Channel 4).    My research integrates theoretical frameworks from psychology, media and cultural studies, to analyse in-depth interviews with ex-TV participants, producers and therapists.  The aim is to better understand what makes participation successful, and what the challenges may be with a view to establishing good practice when working with participants with mental health issues.  In addition, this research provides a unique lens to consider psychosocial factors that influence the success of the therapeutic outcomes for participants involved, with wider relevance to other mental health initiatives and clinical practice.

My interest in these issues stems from 12 years of experience working in UK factual TV production -  filming skin graft operations, daredevils jumping out of balloons, and parenting interventions amongst other things.

The PhD project I am currently working on is researching trans and non-binary embodied experiences and the implications for urban planning theory and practice. How does contemporary English local planning practice incorporate gender into policy and practice? Can planning be inclusive of trans and non-binary residents?

I am utilising creative mapping methods to explore trans and non-binary embodiment and spatialities, alongside discourse analysis and stakeholder interviews to understand local planning practice.

My research interests are contemporary urban governance and the role of planning within this; the geographies of gender and sexuality; British planning and it's relationship to colonialism; queer and transfeminist political praxis.

PhD Thesis: AN ARTISTIC INQUIRY INTO DATA BODY AUGMENTATION AND POST-BIOLOGICAL IDENTITY

This thesis examines Post-Biological Identity and Augmentation Aesthetics through  the Data Body Trader Art project, the establishment of The MIxed and Augmented Reality Art Organisation and the iterative processes, outcomes and conclusions resulting from these endeavours. Specifically, this research aims to present a body of artist practice that focuses on Augmentation Aesthetics, in order to create works of Art that enable better understandings of Post-Biological Identity. This is achieved through the creation of artworks and practice-based research endeavours that focus on the relationship between bodies of matter, data bodies, and their augmentation in embodied, interactive scenarios. This thesis expands these claims to demonstrate through Art, how by having bodies that are both material and virtual, humans are bio-digitally convergent and therefore Post-Biological, and how this requires a reconfiguring of current methods for discourse and representation in these fields. 

This thesis presents a practice-based research journey through these discourses, with a particular focus on embedding Augmentation Aesthetics and Post-Biological Identity within the history of art, embodiment and media, identifying and addressing previous gaps in knowledge and practice-based research models. Following an introduction to the field and its place within artistic practice, a hybrid set of terms and a bespoke practice-based, iterative methodology that was developed will be presented, along the outcomes of these being put into practice, specifically through the Data Body Trader artwork and more expansively through MARArt.org. Through a process of iterative practice-based research, several new conclusions are established and presented in the form of artworks, exhibitions, interviews, invited papers and panel discussions. Furthermore, by undertaking a socially engaged approach to the development and presentation of its outcomes through marart.org, this research pivots from historical examples and recent arbitrary iterations of augmentation, towards a more expansive contemporary understanding of the term, in order to better define the field and the artist’s own practice. 

These outcomes make several original contributions to knowledge, offering both an artistic project and an organisational approach that explore and present Post-Biological Identity through the lens Augmentation Aesthetics, in other words, an aesthetics that focuses on entangling the physical and metaphysical, through liminal artistic practice. This allows not only for a better understanding of these fields, but also to function as a point of reference for further research and development.  By presenting methods of production and proliferation of bodies, as both data and flesh at the same time through Augmentation Aesthetics, this thesis offers a redefining of our understandings of human representation, more specifically trans-individuality, bio-digitally convergent bodies and this emergent concept of the Data Body. The thesis is concluded by framing this research within the wider discourses of immersive media art, Bio-Art and how these perpetuate extended human experiences of self, forcing us to reconsider how we engage with and consider them both in the wake of new innovative approaches and more speculatively into the future.

I am a registered social worker, with experience working in the statutory, private and voluntary sectors, both in community, acute hospital and specialist in-patient services, with adults, young people and children. I completed a Masters degree in Global Health at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School in 2022, and stepped away from frontline practice to undertake a PhD at the University of Brighton. My PhD study aims to develop tools to improve the identification and support of victims of domestic abuse and modern slavery in a telemedicine context.

I am interested in research that improves the accessibility and acceptability of health and social care services, with a particular focus on marginalised and disadvantaged populations. I am especially interested in issues surrounding mental health, conflict and violence, social justice, and human rights, and their intersections with gender, race and sexuality identities. I am also interested in social work education, and ways to support and encourage more social work practitioner-led research.