I am a sociologist of higher education. My work focuses on three areas. Firstly, the role of pedagogy, curriculum and knowledge in the transformation of indivdiual students and in how this affects what they can contribute to wider society. I draw upon sociological theory to describe how inequalities are reproduced or transformed through the knowledge, pedagogies and curricula that students from diverse backgrounds and who embody and encounter different intersecting inequalities (e.g. age, (dis)ability, class, ethnicity, sexuality) encounter in universities of different status. The second area of work focuses on academic staff in universities, using a critical realist approach to explore the way that individual biography, academics' agency and the economic, social, political and cultural context of neo-liberal university life affects individual careers and the value that is put upon different aspects of academic work in the social sciences and humanities. The third area of work that I am engaged in is based upon a collaboration between four European and four Chinese Universities and it is funded by ERASMUS + Capacity Building in Higher Education. My interest in this project is increasingly focused on how socially just and intellectual credible knowledge can be co-created by South and North partners. I am interested in the way power differentials between academic staff, different knowledge systems and different countries can be addressed in such a way that work can be truly collaborative.
