I am a chellenge-led researcher working in coalitions with practitioners, policy-makers, activists, people with lived experience, and researchers across disciplinary divides to reduce the vulnerabilisation of women facing multiple disadvantage and others in difficult life situations. This approach leads me to working at all levels of the support service landscape, such as: understanding issues, co-designing new services and interventions (including critical engagement with and design of those that are digital and big data/AI- driven), re-imagining opportunities for support, working with statutory bodies, and engaging with commissioners and policymakers locally, regionally, and nationally. In all of this work, I aim to centre and amplify lived experience and frontline staff experience wherever possible often through collaborative craft, making, and creative practice; creating platforms and facilitating alternative formats for sharing experience with the explicit intention of improving services and radically re-imagining systems of care. Much of this work has been place-based, situated in the North East of England, but I have also previously worked in Austria, Romania, Moldova, and Canada, among others.
I do this work alongside colleagues as founder and co-leader of the Design Feminisms Research Group in the school of Design, Arts, and Creative Industries and as co-founder and co-lead of the Gendered Violence and Abuse Interdisciplinary Research Theme (a university-wide research group). Over the years I have also had the absolute privilege of working with multiple research assistants and PhD students, all of whom have worked on topics related to justice-oriented community-based and community-driven research.
Alongside being an academic, I am also a member of several working groups and networks, using research and practice to support existing work led by practitioners. These include, for example, Revival Newcastle and the Transforming Together network who aim to make Newcastle an inclusive recovery city and transform services for women facing multiple disadvantage in the North East respectively.
Working in purposeful partnership, groups I am part of and lead co-design new imaginations for service delivery through creative participatory practice and research. I am dedicated to continually developing my learning, knowledge, and engagement with ethical research practice and am keen to support early career researchers and students, especially those with ‘non-traditional’ academic backgrounds.
As such, my work sits at various intersections of feminist theory and practice and my writing often explores topics related to methodology and ethics, and highlights ways in which academia can become more meaningfully collaborative, interdisciplinary, and challenge-driven through creative in-the-world research.
Alongside many papers and reports, my first book was published by Springer in 2021; titled ‘Digitally Augmenting Traditional Craft Practices for Social Justice: The Partnership Quilt’. My second book is currently under contract with Policy Press (an imprint of Bristol University Press), titled ‘Crafting Shared Practices of Hope: Using Collaborative Textile Practice to Imagine, Build, and Maintain Better Worlds’.
Work I have undertaken, supervised, or collaborated in has been funded by several organisations, including but not limited to: the British Academy, the EPSRC, the AHRC, The British Council’s Craft Futures programme, Changing Lives, the Lloyds Bank Foundation, as well as public and third sector funders.
Before joining Northumbria School of Design as a Lecturer in 2019, I was a Research Officer at Swansea University’s Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice (2018-2019) and a PhD student working at Newcastle University's Human-Computer Interaction research gorup, Open Lab (2015-2019).
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