A few more for your viewing pleasure this morning.
Dr Chris Millora, Goldsmiths, University of London
I am Lecturer in Education and Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, leading the project 'Literacies of Dissent: learning, youth activism and social change' in the Philippines and Chile. Broadly, I research links between youth learning/literacies and social justice, particularly in Global South contexts.
Dr Glyn Everett, University of the West of England
About me
I am a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Architecture and Built Environment Research (CABER).
I have previously worked on two EPSRC-funded projects looking at the multiple potential benefits of adopting a blue-green approach to flood risk management.
A distinguishing aspect of this research was the concern for understandings and solutions to be co-constructed with stakeholders and the wider public, to ensure all feel some ownership of the end-product.
I am now keen to pursue this work further, considering access & usability of BGI for disabled people, and how co-construction could improve this. I also intend to gain funding to conduct research around different aspects of built environment access auditing and built environment education for inclusive design.
Dr Christopher Lloyd, University of Hertfordshire
Meet Dr Christopher Lloyd, a Senior Lecturer in English Literature. He is also the co-chair of the LGBTQ+ staff network, which he values as a 'space for people to come together safely.' He shares his ideas to achieve greater equality for all.
Since 2020 I have been co-chair of the LGBTQ+ staff network. Before that I wasn’t a member, as I didn’t know if it was ‘for’ me, in a sense. I also lived far from campus, so I knew it would be hard to make social events. But now I am involved I can see how – if nothing else – it provides a space for people to come together safely. It now feels like a haven outside of the usual university week.
I think as soon as you find the people around you who feel and experience similar things, or at least can understand your own individuality – and actively support it – then you automatically feel safer in a work/study environment.
As a sector we need to do more in terms of representation (in management, in curricula, in teaching etc). We need to support and champion (explicitly) trans people, especially trans people of colour. This also means not inviting scholars to the University who have track records of making discriminatory comments to members of the LGBTQ+ community.
We need to help students and staff to understand gender and sexuality in a more nuanced way: e.g. knowing the difference between sex/gender, understanding the LGBTQIA+ categories, thinking about non-binary identities and foregrounding pronouns etc.
Every LGBTQ+ person has probably been discriminated in some way during their life; those who are trans and gender nonconforming, or those who are queer and POC, probably more so. Staff and students continually misgender colleagues of mine, for instance.
We need to move away from heteronormative models of understanding the world and have straight people acknowledge that ‘coming out’ isn’t a one-time process, but rather an ongoing thing.
Dr Matilda Fitzmaurice, Lancaster University
Description
I will investigate the growing phenomenon of (in)voluntary childlessness in response to climate change to show how the domain of (social) reproduction is, and will be, a critical space in which responses to the climate emergency will play out, and how the human is adapting to climate change. While many media narratives present the decision not to have (more) children as simply another consumer choice among others, my qualitative, feminist research aims to giving voice to participants’ diverse, situated understandings of their (non)reproductive choices in relation to the climate emergency. Furthermore, I aim to provide insights on whether participants are cultivating alternative practices of family- and kin-making.
Layperson's description
My research asks how the climate emergency is changing our understandings of what it means to be human. All over the world, people are adjusting their expectations about how to live safe, healthy and fulfilling human lives in a climatically unstable future. In much political and media conversation about the climate emergency, the focus is on how to reorganise and transform our societies in areas such as energy, transport, food and housing. However, these questions often overlook the "everyday spaces" of the family and the household. For some people in wealthier, industrialised countries, the climate emergency is contributing to decisions to have fewer children, or not to have children at all. In other words, they are thinking differently about what a family, and a family life, look like. This project has two aims: first, to establish whether the climate emergency is contributing to decisions to have (fewer) children; and second, to understand whether these decisions involve alternative family structures or relationships.
I am left wondering how any of these people would cope with life outside academia. And how most of them really should be.
It's absolutely mind-blowing. I can't take any of them seriously.