Research students

Prior to his doctoral study, a critical approach to arts and culture has informed his collaborative work and interdisciplinary research at the intersection of humanities and social sciences. He has been qualified as a social worker, developed his professional practice and expertise in young people and the arts, and completed a second undergraduate degree in Culture and Arts Management (Panteion University in Athens) and a Master's degree in Education: Culture, Language and Identity (distinction from Goldsmiths). Within a theoretical framework of critical race theory and cultural studies, his master’s dissertation used a sample of 26 Western school films to analyse the representation of black schoolteachers in popular movies.  

Ioannis’ primary subject of research is young people’s equality and participation in society, with secondary academic interests in politics of arts in education, the civic role of museums, heritage learning and creative methodologies in research with children and young people. Visual arts, participatory theatre, documentary and oral history have been among the methodologies he used with various groups and populations (young offenders, ethnic minority, disabled, looked after young people) in museums, schools, public services, art and third-sector organisations in Greece, Cyprus, EU and UK. He is blogging about his research at https://youtopias.org. 

This research explores how teachers understand, plan for, and implement culturally sustaining practices in classrooms in England. It investigates the role that students’ cultural identities play in shaping educational experiences and how teachers incorporate these identities into their pedagogy. By examining teacher perspectives and practices, the study aims to highlight both the importance and the practical challenges of embedding Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in the English education system.

Using ethnography and drawing on methods from Visual Anthropology, Ben’s research will explore the placemaking practices of skateboarders to investigate ways to design public space to be more diverse, inclusive and playful.

Ben is interested in various community-led skateboarding initiatives which are emerging in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and surrounding areas of East London. He will be closely affiliated with City Mill Skate, a research project which uses a participatory design process to build a series of ‘skate dots’ (skateable architectural sites) throughout UCL East campus, with the aim of broadening participation in education.

Ben has a BA in Philosophy and Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester and an MSc in Anthropology from Aarhus University. His MSc thesis focussed on embodiment and risk in extreme sports subcultures.

Her PhD research focuses on pedagogies to aid teachers in using texts featuring Muslim protagonists for the benefit of all pupils in a diverse classroom. Ameena is passionate about incorporating texts with characters from marginalised backgrounds into the English curriculum, encouraging inclusivity and offering a view of the world through texts that depict the ‘multicultural’ demographic of many schools in the UK.  stemmed from her MA in Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, where she focused on children's reactions to reading texts with Muslim protagonists for her dissertation.   

You can read more about Ameena’s MA project and how this has influenced her PhD research here. (PDF)

My project is autoethnographic in approach and is inspired by my own experience of being a teaching assistant for thirteen years and then becoming a classroom teacher. I am interested in analysing the multifaceted roles that Black and Brown TAs play in the school community and challenging the intersectional inequalities that Black and Brown women face in the workforce.

I have a BA in Education from the University of Greenwich and a PGCE and MA from Goldsmiths.

Alongside my studies, I am a community leader and volunteer and help to run several community groups in the local area.

I work as a full-time primary school teacher in Peckham.

My ongoing research project examines children's collaborative comics making during an after school comics club. Through action research and narrative inquiry, the project seeks to explore the following questions:

• What stories emerge from children’s collaborative comics making?
• What do these stories tell us about children’s understanding of comics and collaborative comics making?
• What do these stories tell us about the role of clubs as a place for learning about comics?
• What do these stories tell us about developing a pedagogy to support children’s comic making?

The research considers the place of comics in the primary school curriculum, the role of alternative sites of learning and how children learn comics making. Pulling on theory from comics studies, education studies and children's literature, I employ a multi-disciplinary approach. I view children’s comics making as an embodied, iterative and dialogic process, and as a playful reimagining of narratives. Clubs act as liminal, third-spaces for learning in the borderlands, allowing for creative freedom and self-publishing. A pedagogical approach to teaching which views learning as an adventure in time and space is key to creating new possibilities for children to flourish.

I also co-organise the successful Yo Comics! A comics fair for and by kids - more information can be found on our Instargram.

Supervisors

• Professor Vicky Macleroy
• Dr Emily Corbett

Yuntong Li is a full-time PhD student in the educational studies department.

Her research looks at the effect of the Double Reduction Policy (DRP) on equity and social justice under the nine-year compulsory education system in urban and rural areas in China. DRP is the latest published policy that requires a reduction in the total amount and time required by school homework and a reduction in the burden of after-school campuses. This is a significant change in the Chinese education policy system, and Yuntong Li is examining how the ‘shadow education’ industry, also known as private tutoring, will be affected by this policy.

Her research specifically focuses on a comparative study of urban and rural schools to illustrate inequality factors in the Chinese nine-year compulsory system. Yuntong Li’s research interest was sparked during her teaching experience at two schools in different locations - one in an urban area in northeast China, and another in a rural area in the south. This experience allowed her to observe the disparities in educational resources between urban and rural areas. She gained skills in evaluating students’ academic performance and problem-solving through her internship experience.

Yuntong Li completed her BA in Chinese language and literature in China and her MSc in education at the University of Southampton, where she developed qualitative and quantitative skills. Her master’s thesis explored the roles of Information and communication technologies (ICT) and interactive whiteboards in a dialogic teaching and learning environment.

She worked in IT Management for 20 years before returning to literature and completing her MA in Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths in 2021. She’s in the second year of her PhD at Goldsmiths. Her research focuses on the representations of females (children and adults) in the Carnegie Winners from 1937 to 2022. A central component of her PhD is action research with her teenage daughter and a group of her friends to understand how they read and perceive these representations.

Her research interests are centered around LBGT inclusion with pupils with SEND. Her research is employing qualitative methods.

Klaudia is originally from Gelnica, Slovakia, and has lived in the UK since 2002. She worked for 16 years in London as an SEN educational practitioner. Prior to her Ph.D. studies, she held a leadership position managing the Ofsted area of Behaviour and Attitudes in an SEN school for the Blind.

She has appeared in several publications, including Dr. Sewell’s book titled ‘Diverse Voices in Educational Practice’, in which she contributed to the ‘Voice Practices to Support LGBTQ+ Educators and Pupils chapter.

Klaudia gained her MA in Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her MA dissertation was titled ‘Strategies for supporting SEND young people into employment: a case study of a SEND college in Surrey'.

She completed her PGCE studies at London South Bank University, specialising in SEND. As a teacher, she has worked in primary, secondary, and Sixth Form settings with children and young people with a vast range of SEND.

Klaudia also holds a BA (Hons) Degree in English Language and Literature from the Open University.

https://www.klaudiamatasovska.com

Prior to the beginning of my doctoral studies in 2022 full-time, I’ve worked as an English language teacher in Kuwait for almost 10 years

I’ve taught in a public intermediate school called Hmood Bargash Al-Saduon for three years, and after obtaining my MA in TESOL from the University of Brighton in 2015, I joined the Language Center at the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training (PAAET), and started teaching General English and ESP courses at the College of Basic Education of that institution.

I’m interested in exploring the complex dynamic in the relationship between teacher beliefs and their teaching practices. As Simon Borg stated, ‘if we want to understand what teachers do, if we want to promote change, we also need to look at beliefs.’, and as someone who has studied and taught in both public schools and universities in Kuwait, I think that more practitioner-led research is needed to capture the experiences and insights of professional teachers and enable them to build improvements from within the Kuwaiti educational system.

My study aims to capture such an experience in the Kuwaiti context by exploring the relationship between beliefs and practices with regards to the teaching of vocabulary among English language teachers at a higher educational institution in Kuwait.

Beyond this, the study aims at understanding what teachers view as the influences and pressures placed upon their teaching in the classroom, and seeks to understand how English language teachers view these sociocultural influences as potentially having an impact upon their teaching methods and practices.

Her most recent publications include : 

'A Proposition: Collaborative Practices in the Secondary Curriculum for Cultural Sustainability',  'Collaboration is Uncomfortable' and ‘Miss, what should we do with this now?’  They can be found via her Academia page. 

Terri is also the Head of Creative Arts and Head of teacher training and development at Elstree Screen Arts Academy in North London.

Devina has a strong interest in researching inequalities within the education system and corresponding policy implications. Her thesis aims to incorporate a blend of qualitative and quantitative research methods to collect and analyse data.

She has completed her MSc in Political Economy of Development from SOAS, University of London. Her MSc dissertation was titled ‘A Comparative Study on the Effects of Remittances on Poverty Reduction in Kerala and Nepal’.

Devina also completed her PGCE from UCL specialising in History. Through her teaching experience, she has taught History in both international and secondary school settings.

Her BSc was in History and Politics from Brunel University London, where she also volunteered to tutor GCSE English to disadvantaged students from local schools.

Alice is focusing on the novels of Patrick Ness and Frances Hardinge, especially Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go and Hardinge's Face Like Glass.

This research builds on Alice's dissertation for her MA in Children’s Literature, which she completed at Goldsmiths in 2019; she became increasingly interested in the subjectivity of 'normal' as represented in YA fiction and the role that language plays in shaping a sense of self. Alice is passionate about children’s literature and YA fiction and the importance of young people having access to wide-ranging, diverse fiction as well as new, critical ways of reading texts and seeing their relevance to both representing and also shaping society and the world. As part of her research, Alice is using close analysis and a school-based project as her methodologies. She will be visiting a secondary school in the third or fourth year of her PhD and running critical literacy-based workshops with young people to engage with the YA fantasy fiction of Patrick Ness and Frances Hardinge.

Lidiya’s research focuses on foreign language teaching and learning across diverse contexts, with particular interest in the evolving identities of language learners as they move between these environments. Her current project explores how adult English language learner identities emerge within three distinct socio-political settings in Bulgaria, paying close attention to how these identities intersect with other social dimensions such as professional, national, and European affiliations.

With extensive teaching experience across a range of ages, levels, and educational settings, Lidiya is also the founder of a language centre in Sofia. She holds an MA in English Language Teaching from Sofia University, where her research examined the role of musical ability in supporting foreign language acquisition in early childhood. She later earned a second MA in Applied Linguistics and Communication from Birkbeck, University of London. Her dissertation applied statistical analysis to investigate the extent of foreign accent in adult English learners, exploring whether this is influenced more by language aptitude or personal attitude.

Supervisors

• Dr Cristina Ros i Solé
• Dr Vally Lytra

In the shadow of increased polarisation of views, rising racism, anti-immigrant stances and the resurgence of white supremacist groups in the UK, it is imperative that racial literacy, the knowledge and ability to recognise the permeating role of race and racism in society, is heightened nationally. The school is a foundational space where students encounter or participate in race talk, yet in schools, race discourse- or the way people communicate ideas, opinions and experiences of race to one-another- continues to be dictated by educators and educational frameworks who decide what is appropriate to discuss within the classroom.

This timely project explores racial literacy amongst English secondary school students and how they discuss issues surrounding race in informal and formal spaces of the school. By focusing on how secondary school students discuss issues surrounding race, it addresses a significant gap in the race and education field that is currently dominated by studies pertaining to teachers experiences.

Bringing together ethnographic style research and youth-led participatory methods, this project examines the intricacies of race discourse by observing secondary school students within formal (classrooms) and informal (library) areas of the school, to understand how they discuss issues surrounding race, noting their ability to articulate themselves and engage with the discussion. Initial classroom observations will go on to inform a series of workshops exploring student experiences of discussing race in which students will produce a resource materials pack for teachers, highlighting their needs when discussing race. As an impetus to institutional change, this research concentrated on race calls attention to the way students discuss race within school spaces. Such insights will contribute to developing education policies aiding students in discussing race freely within school boundaries.

Supervisors

• Dr Sarah Pearce
• Dr Chris Millora

My research focuses on the role of Community Schools in supporting young people to preserve their heritage language and cultural identity. I aim to examine how these schools can foster supportive, culturally rich learning environments by exploring pedagogical approaches and effective teaching strategies. With a particular emphasis on instructional methods tailored to the needs of bilingual and multilingual learners, this study seeks to demonstrate how educators can promote language retention, cultural awareness, and a strong sense of belonging. Ultimately, the research highlights the vital contribution of community schools in strengthening linguistic and cultural continuity for future generations.

Supervisors

• Dr Vally Lytra
• Dr Yangguang Chen

With qualifications in both the humanities and the sciences, Tudor Balinisteanu explores the origins of rhythmic capacity by researching the dynamics of empathy and cognitive control in small-scale societies dances from Australasia to Africa and South America.

This research examines dance sequences of similar socio-emotional significance in ten small-scale societies to test the hypothesis that rhythm originates in mutual entrainment as opposed to originating in external entrainment to a musical beat. The small scale-societies are Bohinemo, Fore, and Tobrianders (Papua New Guinea), Sadong (Borneo), Dani (Indonesia), Mwani (Mozambique), Himba (Namibia), Dioula (Burkina Faso), Serer-Safen (Senegal) and Shuar (Amazonian Ecuador).

The central argument is that dance evolved from mutual entrainment and that dance to external rhythm evolved sometime later to carry forward in one's life-course the benefits of mutual entrainment, derived from the experience of closeness and empathy.

Supervisors

• Dr Karina J. Linnell 
• Professor Michael Banissy

My research project originates and extends within the investigation of awareness of verbal and non-verbal communication skills, specifically focusing on atypical development in childhood, and pathology in adulthood.

Developing awareness of your own skills to interact in the social context is fundamental to everyday life. However, the domain of awareness of social and linguistic skills in childhood has not yet been investigated thoroughly. The first part of my project aims to fill this gap by investigating the development of awareness of communication skills in a cohort of children with typical and atypical development.

During lifespan, distortions of awareness have been reported after brain injuries, a disorder known as anosognosia. Even if the term anosognosia has been applied originally to motor impairments, researchers recently suggested that it could be applied also to other pathological conditions, e.g., specific language impairments and Theory of Mind deficits. The second part of my research aims to expand this topic, by evaluating awareness of verbal and non-verbal communication skills in aphasic patients with acquired brain injuries.

Supervisors

• Dr Gianna Cocchini
• Dr Evelyne Mercure

Supervisors

• Professor Michael Banissy

Our research looks at the links between language, cognition, movement and musical activity early in life. Infants make great leaps in all of these skills between 6-18 months of age, and our work aims to capture how parent-child interaction facilitates these developments.

Supervisor

• Professor Lauren Stewart

My research focuses on using video games to act as a first stage early intervention to those at risk of developing mental health problems. It involves the investigating and understanding the positive effect video games can have and uncovering the themes that are present in specific games, that could help someone who might not have access to mental health solutions. The goal of the research is to have stickers on the back of game boxes that indicate if they can help with mental health symptoms.

Supervisors

• Professor Jonathon Freeman  
• Dr Karina J Linnell

Researching interoceptive sensitivity – the awareness and accuracy one possesses about their own internal bodily processes – and its relationship with the ability to switch modes of thought. Mode-switching may be briefly described as the ability to shift from analytic thinking to associative thinking. I study these in the context of creative performance. My aim is to combine methods both behavioural (Thinking and Bodily Awareness Tasks, Cardiac afferent activity) and neural (EEG, state dependent TMS) to study these relationships.

Supervisor

• Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya

Flow is a cognitive state characterised by effortless engagement in challenging, skill-demanding scenarios. This project critically questions whether Flow states can be experimentally induced and controlled by investigating Flow’s temporal and potentially domain-specific brain and body signatures.

Visual artists, musicians, and video gamers frequently report Flow experiences. Therefore, these populations will have their Flow experiences captured in their natural environment using real-time, mobile-Electroencephalogram (EEG) and physiological measures. The resultant data will be analyzed using machine learning to identify consistent and variable markers of Flow processes, thereby informing whether experimental Flow-induction methods are feasible.

Supervisors

• Dr Peter Holland
•  Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya

Chloe investigates the development of musical skills in childhood, in particular focusing on emotional and social components of musical ability. She is currently developing the 'Young-Gold Music Tests', a measurement battery which aims to overcome issues with more traditional musical ability tests using novel test designs.

Her previous research has involved test development of behavioural measures to assess emotion perception, specifically focused on the ability to decode emotional intentions from music performances.

Supervisor

• Professor Daniel Müllensiefen

My study aims to examine various personality and demographic factors that may affect reactions to the pandemic, including any protective factors that may make some people cope better with the pandemic restrictions. Furthermore, I will expand my research by conducting a mindfulness intervention to investigate these links in more depth.

My research focuses on a person's ability to accurately identify the behaviour of another, and how this affects communication, cooperation, and information elicitation in an investigative interviewing context. I am especially interested in factors that contribute to this accuracy, and whether this is a trainable skill.

After systematically reviewing the present literature, I will experimentally test this ability and start to develop and test training materials that could be applied in a real-world setting.

Supervisors

• Professor Fiona Gabbert
• Dr Adrian Scott

My research focus is on 'what works' in missing person appeals, with a specific focus on various types of content and their influence on key cognitive processes such as attention and behavioural change for a more successful outcome. The ultimate goal of my PhD is to create a more psychologically informed and effective missing person appeals format that could be implemented by a variety of organisations such as charities, law enforcement, and families.

Supervisors

• Dr Adrian Scott  
• Professor Fiona Gabbert

Existing theories of flow have taken an associative rather than a causal theoretical approach. In other words, these theories attempt to describe what occurs at a neurocognitive level during flow but not how and why flow arises. The main purpose of my research is to develop a causal theory of flow, centred around the role of internal and sensory feedback.

I focus on a particular phenomenon in basketball known as the ‘hot-hand’, where the probability of shooting success is thought to increase after a streak of successful shot attempts. The hot hand lends itself particularly well to a causal investigation of flow because it is a sequential phenomenon with measurable behavioural outcomes that develop over time.

Using mobile EEG and physiological measures of emotion, I plan on studying how motor accuracy, flow, and arousal evolve over time during basketball shooting tasks. Finally, I intend to investigate whether the causal mechanisms underlying flow in basketball are transferable to music listening, with the objective of designing effective music interventions for flow induction.

Supervisors

• Dr Karina J Linnell 

I am a music psychology researcher. My research largely focusses on the effect of music training on cognition. There is a considerable amount of research supporting the idea that music training can improve working memory, attention, and other cognitive skills. Currently, I am looking at how we organise and prioritise musical information in working memory. I am considering both music reading and listening to develop and test a novel paradigm for investigating music working memory.

Rather than just number of friends or amount of social contact, there is mounting evidence to suggest that it is the depth of our social connections to family, friends and partners that our mental health is closely tied to.

Building bonds appears to be important; but at any stage of any relationship there are emotional barriers that make it harder to deepen it. The traits and habits that can help people more easily overcome those barriers are therefore an important target for research.

Using population-wide datasets and new methodologies like True Correlations, his PhD will focus on understanding the types of loneliness that matter most, and the behaviours that might help to prevent it.

Curiosity, our desire to know, is vital to learning and life satisfaction. Currently, some existing research argues that curiosity can result in a pleasurable and rewarding feeling after we learn something new and resolve an 'information gap' in our knowledge. This drive to fill information gaps can feel satisfying as we experience novel situations and encounter uncertain environments.

Despite curiosity's importance to learning, interestingly, there is a lot about curiosity which is unknown - for example, how do we express curiosity differently? If curiosity is rewarding, what happens when abstract rewards such as information are pitched against robust rewards, such as money? My research is interested in the pleasure of knowing, that great feeling of ease and enjoyment when we satisfy our curiosity about topics we're interested in. I'll be researching this in our behaviour and using neuroscientific methods, such as EEG, to better understand what brain networks are involved in the important activity of being curious. 

Supervisors

• Dr Stacey Humphries
• Dr Maria Herrojo-Ruiz

My research takes an ecologically valid approach to understanding the nature of the relationship between music and episodic & autobiographical memory. Traditional measures of episodic memory have neglected to account for an individual’s sense of presence, first-person perspective, and spatiotemporal awareness of their surroundings. Virtual reality is therefore a useful tool to study how music influences an individual’s ability to remember highly realistic environments, and how those unique memories persist.

Using VR, music information retrieval (MIR), and EEG, my research aims to explores the nature of this relationship with attention to several factors, including how musico-acoustic features may differentially impact encoding, via which mechanisms music may contribute to memory retrieval, and how persistent music-evoked autobiographical memories are characterised.

My research aims to advance understanding of how implicit biases affect juror decision-making and to explore practical methods for mitigating these biases in the courtroom.

Supervisors:

• Professor Fiona Gabbert
• Dr Adrian Scott

Performance anxiety (PA), which affects 20–75% of professionals and students in fields such as public speaking, sports, and the performing arts, can significantly impact health and career development.

Individuals with PA exhibit alterations in cardiorespiratory, cognitive, and emotional states before and during performances. These changes do not uniformly lead to negative outcomes; some individuals excel under anxiety, while others falter.

Using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines neuroimaging techniques (EEG), cardiovascular measurements, and robust statistical models, my PhD project aims to identify the behavioural, cognitive, and neurophysiological processes contributing to the facilitatory and detrimental effects of PA on performance.

By focusing on skilled performers, specifically piano players, this methodological framework is expected to enhance our understanding of PA and pave the way for developing effective strategies to mitigate its negative impacts while promoting resilience and well-being in affected individuals.

Supervisor:

• Dr Maria Herrojo Ruiz