About
I am currently a Research Associate on CHESS Civic Health Equity: from Silos to Systems capturing lived experiences of health and social inequalities within Liverpool City Region. I am a member of both the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, and the Department of Public Health, Policy and Systems at the University of Liverpool.
As a mother of four, a community educator and a researcher, I am committed to challenging the invisibility of mothering in higher education and wider society. My work is shaped by more than twenty years at the Pen Green Centre for Children and their Families where I ran community education groups, domestic abuse support groups, ante-natal groups for young mothers and play groups for young children. As a community researcher I designed and collaborated on projects exploring all aspects of local family life including domestic abuse, premature babies, learning through play, welfare reforms, and parental involvement in education. I also worked alongside mothers in reclaiming their own education, accessing higher education, or training them as teachers and early years professionals. I gained many years experience teaching, and writing about, undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Early Childhood, SEND, Social Policy, Andragogy and Pedagogy, and Community Development.
I work, research, and write from lived experience as a young-student-mother and an older academic caring for adult offspring. My PhD in Education from the University of Manchester employed a feminist standpoint to examine young student-mothering by combining storytelling, secondary analysis of population data, and legal-herstorical research to illuminate intersecting structural barriers and injustices. Whilst completing my PhD I taught across the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Education at the University of Manchester specialising in community engagement, creative research methods, parent participation, social justice, and equality, diversity and inclusion. I am volunteer for Sandblast working with mothers in the Western Sahara refugee camps who are training to teach to develop their own pedagogy of liberation.
I spent 3 years as a researcher on the Local Matters programme, a national research initiative that parters with schools, charities, and cultural organisations as social justice researchers, critically analysing big data and collecting local data to develop evidence-based responses to policies and practices related to disadvantage, poverty, and broader social justice issues. I supported the development of an online CPD resource pack for the NEU and the UK’s first ‘Attitudes to Poverty’ survey.
As part of the Power, Inequality and Activism research group I recently worked intergenerationally with inner-city Manchester residents conducting archival research and co-producing oral histories. The project recovered the stories of Ellen Wilkinson and other local women whose contributions to social justice have been largely ignored in mainstream historical narratives. The work led to the creation of an interactive social justice walking tour which symbolises and enhances the connection between the university and the community, promoting the civic university agenda through shared use of spaces, resources and stories.