SCDTP's 2023/24 Cohort of Postdoctoral Fellows

Bethan Mathias Prosser

Bethan is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow based at the University of Brighton. Her fellowship extends the impact of the innovative methodology she developed through her PhD: participatory listening research.

She will co-design creative and digital outputs to disseminate her findings on seaside gentrification on the UK South Coast. Through knowledge exchange events, publications and presentations, this approach will be explored as a public engagement tool for hyperlocal socio-environmental and social infrastructure changes.

Elona Hoover

I am a ESRC postdoctoral fellow hosted at the University of Brighton, working with Matthew Adams and colleagues at the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics and the Cities, Injustice and Resistance Research and Enterprise Group.

My work brings together work on commoning in European cities (what I call concrete environments), affect theories and material feminist approaches to more than human relations. My doctoral research identified how potentially violent or debilitating feelings that permeate contemporary (European) cities, such as discomfort or urgency, can be transformed through collective practices that pay attention to, and work with, the affective dimensions of relations with human and non-human others. Such collective practices allow these difficult feelings to be experienced as common notions rather than solely individual emotions. This matters in terms of developing the capabilities within communities and organisations to respond to present and future social and environmental emergencies.

During the fellowship I will work on publishing a monograph that puts the notion of “concrete environments” to work. As my work draws on ethnographic research in France and the UK, the fellowship will also involve engagement workshops in both countries and network building to explore the relevance of my work for different social policy contexts. Finally, I will further develop listening practices and work with sound initiated through my doctoral project by co-produce a five-part podcast with a multi-media artist-activist.

Emily Haddy

Emily is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow based at the University of Portsmouth. The fellowship will further develop the findings of her doctoral research which explored the role of both environmental and human factors as influences on working equid welfare. Her applied doctoral research utilised mixed methods to investigate questions spanning traditional disciplinary boundaries and involved collaboration with multiple animal welfare NGOs.

During the fellowship she will continue to forge links between disciplines and to find novel ways to engage even difficult to access end user communities. Emily plans to investigate the utility of community-based participatory arts approaches to raise awareness of donkey sentience and the risk factors for poor donkey welfare within donkey reliant communities on Lamu Island, Kenya.

She will also develop engagement activities focussing on creating effective exchanges of knowledge and dissemination of research results between academics and non-governmental organisations.

Haiyu Jin

Haiyu Jin is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gerontology at the University of Southampton. Her research aims to investigate the effects of caregiving on the spousal carer’s health and estimate the financial cost of caregiving by the spousal carer based on data from waves 2015 and 2018 of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.

Her research expands the understanding of the sources of endogeneity in the relationship between caregiving and the spousal carer’s health and life satisfaction by showing the presence of time-varying family effects and selection effects. Additionally, she has further developed the use of a fixed effects triple difference model to address endogeneity related to time-varying family effects and selection effects in the context of this study. During her fellowship period, she plans to disseminate her work through publications, conferences, and research visits to other research centres.

Lorenzo Ciletti

I am an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Research in Inclusion, Southampton Education School, University of Southampton. My project explores the classwork of teaching assistants (TA) and their role in the mainstream education of children with Special Needs and/or Disabilities.

The fellowship program is principally centred around two objectives. The first is to increase the awareness and the social impact of my PhD work involving TAs. My doctoral research produced a wide array of nuanced results as to TA classwork, including practical illustrations on how to design effective support strategies for the education of children with SEND. These results will therefore be rendered available through academic publications, conference presentations, and podcast talks for the potential benefit of teaching practitioners, politicians, and academics.

The second objective is to further develop my doctoral research findings on TA practice. To this end, a collaborative study will be designed wherein a small number of TAs and I will co-produce outcomes in relation to technical characteristics of effective TA teaching strategies. We will first discuss my PhD findings regarding TA practices and an influential academic framework that describes typical TA practices. We will then evaluate the findings according to sociocultural principles regarding how children best learn (e.g., transferring the task responsibility to the learner to foster their thinking). Thereafter, the participants will be invited to describe examples of their effective teaching practices in an effort to update this framework.

Zoë Rubenstein

I am an ESRC postdoctoral fellow based at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (CTSG), with mentorship from Dr Olu Jenzen and Professor Lesley Murray. For my PhD, entitled An emerging field? Interventions for people perceived to be at risk of causing sexual harm, I combined Bourdieu’s field theory with a practice-based approach to Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) in an innovative pairing which I believe can be usefully applied to other areas of policy change. I will to use the fellowship year to build on the methodological contributions of my study to the field of IPA.

During the fellowship year, through producing journal articles and presenting at conferences, I intend to bring my methodological toolkit to an academic peer group with expertise in the methods I have drawn upon. Meanwhile, I will immerse myself in the field of gender studies through studying at the CTSG, as well as conducting a placement at University College Dublin with Professor Kath Browne. This will enable me to build an expertise in gender studies, in order that I can focus academically on issues which are important to me on a personal and political level.