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.

Theoretically, his approach draws on Stuart Hall’s notions of the discursively constructed identities and ‘articulation’ (Hall, 1996; Slack, 1996). These understandings of identity as fluid and contingent are set against the use of fixed and separate categories pertaining to ethnicity and social class in equality initiatives.

The research works with a sociolinguistic understanding of subject positions and identities as emergent in processes of interaction (Buscholtz & Hall, 2005). It uses linguistic ethnography to track these processes empirically through linguistic micro-analysis of how students ‘acquire, construct and mobilize communicative repertoires’ (Perez-Milans, 2016:87) as they negotiate their studies. In this way, the study treats learning environments as ‘cultural context[s] with [their] own sites of struggle, local institutional imperatives and affordances’ (Creese, 2008:235) which feed off and into wider socio-historical structures.

Steve has an MSc in Social and Political Theory and an MA in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching. He has taught in Higher Education for over ten years and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Creese, A. (2008) ‘Linguistic Ethnography’, Encyclopedia of Language and Education. London: Springer.

Hall, S. (1996) ‘Introduction: who needs identity?’ in Hall, S. and Du Gay, P. Questions of cultural identity. London: Sage.

Perez-Milans (2016) ‘Language and identity in linguistic ethnography’ in Preece, S. (ed) The Routledge Handbook of language and identity. London: Routledge.

Slack, J. D. (1996) ‘The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies’ in D. Morley & K-H. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies. London: Routledge.  

Her research investigates family language policies and identity developments in Turkish-speaking families in the UK. She focuses specifically on children’s agentive roles and identity constructions through language and other communicative resources.

Her study employs ethnography in discovering children’s influence on the construction of family language policies and practices. It further examines the role of children’s identity negotiations in the multilingual and multicultural home settings.

Busra has an MA in Linguistics from the University of Essex and a master’s degree in Modern Turkish Literature from Erciyes University. She has taught in both primary and secondary schools in Turkey for over two years.

Busra is funded by the Turkish Ministry of Education for her postgraduate studies in the UK.

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)

Angela’s research interests developed through experiences as a teacher working with adjudicated youth in San Diego, California over the past 20 years. Her Master’s degree in Education emphasized curriculum and instruction and now she is a PhD candidate in Arts Practice and Learning at the Centre for Arts and Learning. Her practice, as socially engaged art, explores the ‘work’ of art in the lives of her students and other artists in Barrio Logan, San Diego. Through her practice-based research she utilizes collaborative curation to create openings for conversations to emerge. The conversations in the form of testimonios, verbal journeys, are most often narratives of resistance and imprints of trauma. Within the context of her practice; the stories, artwork, poetry and music serve to initiate conversations as a form of critical pedagogy. The use of testimonios as a critical pedagogy seeks to reveal untold stories that veer from dominant narratives while confronting power structures. Building upon her bachelor degree in geography her research also studies the use of visual imagery and corporeal perceptions in the creation of place in Barrio Logan. Within the testimonios, new stories of place emerge, forming a critical pedagogy of place. Operating an art space in Barrio Logan is central to her own art practice and in establishing a place for local artists and musicians to exhibit, perform and create works of art and music.

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 research investigates a contradiction between my values and my practice as an English teacher; while I recognise the importance of students engaging actively and creatively with texts they are reading, I found myself teaching lessons that positioned my students as passengers rather than meaning-makers. My research involves using a particular form of writing to respond to this living contradiction: Interactive Fiction (IF). IF is a non-linear form of fiction that is read using an electronic device.

Specifically, my thesis responds to the following questions:

How might the introduction of IF into the secondary school English classroom influence the quality of textual entanglements being facilitated?

What can producing a work of IF that is set in a secondary school classroom reveal about my position as a teacher, a writer and a creative practitioner?

How can works of IF be produced for use in the secondary school English classroom? How can introducing works of IF into the secondary school English classroom affect the quality of my teaching practice?

How can introducing works of IF into the secondary school English classroom affect the characteristics of the talk taking place during lessons?

Websites 

• Google Scholar
• makingmeanings.itch.io

Supervisors

• Vicky Macleroy
• Francis Gilbert

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

Her dissertation discusses a study she conducted in a Key Stage 2 classroom consisting entirely of multilingual pupils who were learning a foreign language. The study focuses on how multilingual children negotiate their linguistic and cultural identities, and how they use their language repertoire to aid them in their learning of a new foreign language. Further, she explores how classroom dynamics, the role of the teacher, the monolingual school culture, and English as an Additional Language (EAL) policies in the English educational system influence multilingual children’s learning of a foreign language.

A native of Hanover, Germany, Katharina Kayser began working with multilingual pupils while she was a classroom teacher at a primary school in Germany. She later held a teaching position in a primary school in London where she also performed the duties of Ethnic Minority Achievement Coordinator, and Modern Foreign Language Coordinator. Her latest post was at the Goethe-Institut in Boston, USA where she worked as a regional language consultant and foreign language learning advocate for the Northeast of the USA.

She studies museum educational practices and encounters with abstract modernist art with a new materialist approach in her PhD project. What might be the educational potential of abstract art? How is abstract art mediated and experienced in museums?

Heidi’s research interests are centred around museum education and curating, Deleuzean methodologies, abstract art and modernisms, and art with children and young people.

In 2020, Heidi curated an exhibition about abstract modernist art for the Children’s Art Museum, a section dedicated for children inside Sørlandets Art Museum in Kristiansand, Norway, creating and important empirical part of her PhD project. The exhibition displayed Finnish Post-War abstract art from The Nicolai Tangen Collection together with interactive and digital solutions, focusing on multisensory experiences, movement, and participation in the museum space. In the later stages of her project, she has studied children’s experiences with abstract art both in traditional and experimental settings, with and without video.

Heidi comes originally from Finland. She has a master’s degree in art history (major) and museum studies (minor) from the University of Turku, Finland. She has worked many years as a museum educator in Finland on the side and as part of her studies. Heidi has previously had exchange periods in the United States (Alfred University in Upstate New York 2013), France (Université Paris 8 2015-2016) and Germany (2008).

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.

This is an adaptive exercise, using The Paston Letters, RLS’s original 15th century source material, drawing on other texts based on the same material, and adapting forward to create an original work of Young Adult historical fiction. He is particularly interested in the concept of history as a text which can be subject to adaptation, as well as the dialogic nature of adaptation, not least in how transmediation can affect the reception and structure of a source text. This draws on the work of Bakhtin, Kristeva, Nikolajeva and latterly Cutchins.

Before doing his MA at Goldsmiths Harry worked at the BBC and Granada TV for many years, including stints as a script editor, drama producer and ultimately executive producer of the BAFTA nominated The Great Train Robbery. He has published three middle grade children’s novels, a selection of writers prompts and written three award winning short films.

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

Given the theoretical and equally important practical complexity of multilingual pedagogies, the research is based on the assumption that it is vital for further developments in the field to understand what facilitates or hinders such agency. Thomas understands the mainstream school as a place of lived language experience, shaped by the encounter between children’s linguistic repertoires and society’s power relations as well as by teachers’ and pupils’ negotiations around the various meanings they may give to their language practices.

Thomas has been a primary school teacher for many years in inner city schools in Germany and London. He was involved in action research for academic language teaching, and debates around anti-racist pedagogies. His publications include translated and edited volumes of British chapters in those fields: ‘Schule ist keine Insel’/’School Is Not an Island’ (2000) and ‘Die Macht der Sprachen’/’The Power of Languages’ (with Paul Mecheril, 2006). In 2011-12, Thomas re-trained as a primary teacher (with MFL) at Goldsmiths’ PGCE programme, which also influenced his current research interest.

Her PhD research project investigates the ways children of refugee and immigrant backgrounds negotiate their ecological identities through the reading and writing of poetry.

It draws upon an interdisciplinary framework that brings together theories of ecopoetics and critical pedagogy. Employing a participatory ethnographic methodology, the study further explores the effectiveness of the ecocritical approach to poetry in helping children reconcile the dualities of self/other, familiar/foreign, local/global and human/non-human.

Sara’s MA thesis was on ‘tracking animal traces: the role of animals in selections of children’s poetry by Ahmad Shawqy and Ted Hughes’. She obtained her MA degree in English and Comparative Literature from Ain Shams University (Egypt), where she has been teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) since 2011. Besides her academic path, Sara has experience working with children in Montessori settings in both Cairo and London.

Barad’s (2003) theory of ‘intra-action’ inspired a topological exploration of the two main themes which entwine throughout her research: the skin and the line. She explores the notion of the skin as a new materialist methodology. Through extrapolating the possibilities of the skin as a morphing and ever changing ‘assemblage’ (Deleuze and Guattari:  2004) and by mapping within pedagogical situations Clare discusses how this informs creative and inventive Deleuzian theories of ‘becoming’. The refiguring of the skin as a new materialist and topological agent, which grows, scars, wrinkles and sheds continuously through and with the world, interrogates the traditional constraints of the patriarchal and colonised lines of historical female imagery. By (re)viewing the skin as a ‘leaky sense of self’ (Manning: 2013) the research explores how this can inform creative and inventive refiguring’s of the skin as a political agent for change.

Prior to this Clare received a BA in Scenic Art from Rose Bruford College and an MA in Artist Teacher and Contemporary Practice from Goldsmiths University London. She is also a practicing artist, researcher, teacher working in secondary education in South East London. Publications include The Artist-Teacher in the Classroom and Changes in the Teacher-Student Relationship, with Reference to the Issue of Censorship (2011) and Beauty and the Beast - Can Life Drawing Support Female Students in Challenging Gendered Media Imagery? (2013). 

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

Chunwen Su has been working as an IELTS/Chinese teacher in different independent schools, as well as being an education guardian for teenage Chinese EAL students in London since 2012. She holds a Master's degree in English Language Teaching (Studies and Methods) from the University of Warwick. Now she has completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Her PhD thesis tells the story of four teenage Chinese EAL students’ learning journey in an independent school in England. The purpose of the study was to understand, in depth, the issues of cultural, linguistic, and academic adaptation they faced as teenage Chinese EAL students and find out how these students were supported to meet linguistic, cultural, and academic challenges in their learning journey. Ethnography was adopted as the methodology in this study because it is an ideal educational tool that enables learners to describe aspects of their cultural lives, feelings, beliefs, needs, and actions.

The study shows that although the participants had positive expectations of UK education and considered it an alternative route to success before coming to the UK, they encountered significant challenges such as failing to form friendships with local students, encountering gaps in modes of learning, and having difficulties in studying their core subjects, as well as other issues due to cultural, linguistic and academic factors. EAL lessons were arranged by the school with the aim to improve student's English proficiency. However, participants were concerned that the EAL classes did not correspond with international students’ linguistic needs.

The study suggests that intercultural communication and understanding should be enhanced through further development of linguistic and cultural awareness to help teachers develop a better understanding of students’ cultural differences, previous educational experiences, and their learning styles to better support young international students in their academic transition. International students especially teenagers should be given more cultural, linguistic and academic preparation and support before and after the journey begins.

His research is broadly investigating the impact of high stakes Higher School Certificate exams on the teaching and learning of English Literature in Mauritius.

He has a master’s in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching from the University of Nottingham. His research interests include teaching and learning of English, languages and culture, washback and social view of literacy.  He has taught both at secondary level and at tertiary level in Mauritius. He believes in research that can impact and help to improve the social well-being of people. His desirable goal would be to influence public policy and to improve the quality of education in Mauritius.

Her research, practice and profession combine an interest in languages, language and society, language learning and teaching in school, multilingualism, language policies in education.

Catia’s dissertation discussed the development and implementation of Portuguese language policies for overseas. It traced the official language policies from their formulation, through to their implementation as a project, to their execution by a group of teachers and their administrator in the local community. Her ethnography of language policy involved textual and historical analysis of policy texts and long-term engagement with the agents, arbiters and influencers at different levels of language policy activity. Her collection of focused life stories, using three-part phenomenological interviews and the timeline method, afforded her an in-depth understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by a language provision that sits at the intersection of national and international language policies and practice.

Catia is a qualified teacher of Modern Languages and Literature, with a degree in Portuguese and English studies. She was a teacher of Portuguese and EFL in Portugal and in the UK. She completed an MA in Portuguese Language and Culture, with a dissertation on the challenges and opportunities of multicultural education in Portugal. She was Author and Principal Examiner of Portuguese GCSE and A Level exams for Oxford Cambridge RSA and Cambridge International Examinations. She holds a PG Diploma in Translation and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. She was a Portuguese Teaching Fellow at the University of Southampton, where she founded a community school with funding from the Southampton City Council. Currently, she is Deputy Director of Camões UK and contributes to the management of a network of 26 teachers and 14 lecturers allocated to schools and universities all over the UK and the Channel Islands.

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

I examine the ways in which educational and social policy are constructed in the lives of marginalised children and young people in the UK context. My PhD research focuses on the experiences of girls and young women from low socio-economic groups. My PhD thesis will be published in 2018.

My career to date has included programming, policy, research and funding positions at Tate Modern, Goldsmiths College, Nottingham Contemporary and Arts Council England. My previous research specialisms and publication history focus on the role of contemporary art education in school and gallery contexts and the role of participation in contemporary arts pedagogy and practice.

Teaching at Goldsmiths

Associate Senior Lecturer - Reimagining Social Class in Education; Culture and Identity; Body, Gender, Culture – Module planning, teaching, student supervision and assessment.

Her research is employing an ethnographic methodology alongside questionnaires/interviews with staff working across England.

Allison is originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before moving to Montreal, Quebec, in 2006 and London in 2010 to work as a teacher. In her professional capacity, Allison manages the BTEC and Functional Skills qualifications, ensuring every student leaves her secondary school having achieved at least one qualification.

She runs the ‘Rainbow Club’ in her school for the LGBTQ+ young people and engages the school in wider equalities work. She is a trustee of KeshetUK, England’s Jewish LGBTQ+ charity, and a member of the #LGBTed steering committee.  

Allison is the Student Rep for the PhD Educational Studies programme.

My PhD focuses on ethnic differences in physical activity behaviour change, health and well-being outcomes, inter-group perception in relation to physical activity and perceived barriers to physical activity, specifically for members of the Black and Minority Ethnic community. My research investigates ethnic differences in motivation to change physical activity behaviour and explores some of the reasons for non-participation in physical activity.

I investigate how strategies can improve the physical health outcomes of Black and Minority Ethnic people by encouraging an increase in physical activity. As a qualified movement and drama-therapist I also have an interdisciplinary interest and collaborate on practice based research projects. These partnerships explore psychological relationships to movement and provide additional insights into physical activity choices which augment my research.

I hope that my findings will contribute to the provision of appropriate and effective physical activity interventions, particularly for the Black and Minority Ethnic community who are disproportionately affected with conditions associated with inactivity.   

Supervisor

• Professor Keon West

I am interested in the relationship between rapport and trust as well as the contextual impact of remote interviews on such constructs. I am particularly interested in understanding what contributes to the benefits of building rapport: the behaviours, the feeling of rapport, or both.

I intend to review current literature to develop and validate measures of trust and rapport before comparing different remote interview contexts according to accuracy, rapport, trust, and different levels of self-disclosure.

Supervisors

• Professor Fiona Gabbert 
• Dr Adrian Scott

The focus of my PhD is how we think about the future; specifically how we think about novel personal events that we have not experienced before. To explore this I have interviewed soon to be first time mother's about how they imagine childbirth and early parenthood and how this relates to the pregnancy related anxiety they may be experiencing. This is of particular importance as anxiety during pregnancy is on the increase. The findings from the interviews have informed the development of an intervention that helps soon to be first time mothers imagine the future in a way that reduces their anxiety.

Supervisor

• Dr Lorna Goddard

Night-time can be a frightening experience for some. Indeed, ostensibly paranormal experiences, such as having seen a ghost or a ghoul are often reported during the night. Interestingly, alternative explanations for these experiences have been provided by considering different aspects of sleep, which can be reassuring to those reporting these experiences.

My PhD is focused on the associations between different sleep variables (e.g., exploding head syndrome, sleep paralysis, REM sleep behaviour disorders) and ostensibly paranormal experiences/beliefs (near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, belief in the soul after death).

Supervisors

• Professor Alice Gregory
• Professor Chris French

Haptic feedback and the sense of agency in human-computer interaction.

My research focuses on the experience of intentions, actions and effects when interacting with technology that utilises haptics. More specifically, my project is investigating the role of haptic feedback on the sense of agency. 

Using an interdisciplinary approach, I am interested in utilising robust measures from cognitive neuroscience to examine the effects of manipulating sensory feedback related to our actions and their effects. With this, I aim to further our understanding of the self, and in turn apply this to the design of haptic technology.

Supervisor

• Dr James Moore 

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

Hannah’s research topic centres around the role of interpersonal relationships on bullying involvement. This delves into how siblings may impact bullying involvement, with a focus on between-sibling bullying; as well as the experiences of foster children in bullying at school and within the foster home.

Supervisors

• Dr Alice Jones Bartoli 
• Professor Peter Smith

My current research focuses on how music preference might illustrate certain traits about an individual’s background or beliefs.

This includes understanding how people feel about others who either share or don’t share their music preference, especially in the context of another potential similar or different variables, e.g., political ideology.

My overall goal is to understand what is conveyed via music preference and how groups of seemingly different people can become more united when given the opportunity to make or listen to music they enjoy together.

Supervisors

• Professor Lauren Stewart
• Professor Keon West

A behavioural and neurophysiological approach to investigate how beliefs about reward probability modulate motor vigour in adults, aging and patients with Parkinson's Disease.

Motor improvements have been consistently associated with reward magnitude in deterministic contexts. Yet whether individual inferences on reward probability influence motor vigour dynamically remains undetermined.

In my PhD I am combining behavioural, neuroimaging and computational approaches to investigate how updating beliefs about volatile action-reward contingencies influences motor behaviour in adults, aging and patients with Parkinson's Disease.

Supervisors

• Dr Maria Herrojo Ruiz
• Dr Marinella Cappelletti

My research focuses on two main cognitive functions, face recognition and mental imagery. Specifically, I am investigating the relationship between prosopagnosia and aphantasia, which are respectively the inability of recognising faces and of visualising in the mind's eye.

Previous research has provided self-report evidence on the potential link between the two conditions; my aim is to add to this knowledge by providing more objective measures of face recognition performance.

Additionally, my aim is to investigate not only those cases in which the two conditions coexist, but also those rarer double dissociation cases, such as people with aphantasia but exceptional face recognition abilities. My research involves both developmental and acquired cases.

Supervisor

• Dr Ashok Jansari

Research Description: My research involves exploring how we can use non-invasive brain stimulation, primarily transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to understand social perception. I will be focusing on facial emotion perception and eye gaze perception.

Since covid, the way we interact and communicate is changing, as a society we have spent a lot of time online in Zoom meetings or on a Teams call, the way we communicate has been centred around the face and there is still so much unknown about the processes underlying these daily talks.

I hope to aid in our understanding of these processes but at the same time see how we can utilise techniques like TMS for more than the standard "temporary lesion" method it has become known for.

Supervisors

• Professor Michael Banissy
•  Dr Marinella Cappeletti

Supervisor

• Dr Maria Herrojo Ruiz

During my Ph.D, I aim to build a computational model of common verbal creativity tasks (e.g. the alternative uses task), with elements that reflect these lower-level processes. I also aim to complete empirical research to understand the roles of WM updating and task-switching in creative thought. Ultimately, “creativity” covers a huge range of types of cognition, but there is a common theme related to flexibility. I hope to gain a more concrete understanding of how flexible, creative cognition is achieved.

I am very interested in how creative thought arises from the interactions of more fundamental processes such as attention, working memory, association-making, and cognitive control, and how these processes interact differently in different contexts and individuals.

Supervisors

• Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya
• Professor Alan Pickering

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

To effectively interact with the environment we must estimate the reliability or precision of what we can perceive. Online assessment of confidence in our senses depends on metacognitive monitoring mechanisms in the brain which are thought to be influenced by contextual information. While many scientists assume we do generate these kinds of ‘beliefs about precision’, it remains unclear whether this is the case and how confidence in our senses is encoded in the brain.

My research will use a multi-method approach to characterise the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underpin meta-level beliefs about the reliability of our senses and will investigate how these mechanisms change as we age.

Supervisor

• Dr Rebecca Chamberlain

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

Poetry, being one of the most creative uses of language, ignites one’s creative thought process and hence fosters literary creativity. But how do linguistic parameters of a poem help humans evaluate poetic creativity?

Does the evaluation depend on literary expertise and can it be predicted mechanistically? How does the human brain respond to creative poems and what are the neural correlates of the evaluation of poetic creativity?

I would be aiming at these central questions by adopting a tripartite approach integrating behavioural, electrophysiological and computational techniques. The project would further investigate the role of interoceptive processes during the creative evaluation of poems.  

Supervisors

• Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya 
• Professor Maura Dooley

I design experimental interventions in real exhibition spaces to study the factors that lead to a deepened art viewing experience. In doing so, my research aims to build an optimized model of live art viewing in the gallery, taking into account individual differences, impacts on well-being, and other institution-specific needs. Specifically, I investigate the role that mindful breathing and its effects on physiological arousal, social interaction, and visual literacy play in mood repair and level of aesthetic engagement when viewing artworks.

All research is conducted within a special exhibition room at the Manchester Art Gallery with an opportunistic sample of real museum visitors. We work closely with the curatorial and education team at the gallery to both design and integrate our studies into the museum’s programming agenda.

Supervisors

• Dr Rebecca Chamberlain

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

My research focuses on investigating the content, neural correlates, and functions of visual mental imagery during music listening using behavioural and objective techniques.

Visual mental imagery involves forming images in the mind/mind's eye without a physical reference. It is a common experience while listening to various types of music, and has proposed connections with emotional response to music, as well as suggested to encompass rich and vivid subject matter (from personal memories to detailed storytelling).

My research utilises behavioural techniques, experience sampling, and EEG to understand music-induced visual imagery from three main avenues:1) Content, by creating a thematic framework of prevalent visual imagery subject matter to music, contributing musical features, and content consistency across time;2) Neural Correlates, understanding the relationship between the occipital brain area and subjective reports of visual imagery occurance and intentionality;and finally 3) Functions, by exploring the emotional engagement of aphantasics (those who experience little or no visual imagery) to music and assessing the potential of visual imagery as a stress reduction technique during music listening.

Supervisors

• Dr Diana Omigie
• Professor Lauren Stewart

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'm taking part in the Neurolive project. Among a plurality of subjects, we study the difference between experiencing living arts live and through media. My research concentrate on the collective gaze using eye tracker data.

I am designing a sleep paralysis questionnaire to further explore whether there are distinct types of sleep paralysis experiences. This questionnaire will be used to see if individual differences are related to the type of sleep paralysis a person experiences.

Supervisors

• Professor Chris French
• Professor Alice Gregory
• Professor Alan Pickering

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