I am an Assistant Professor in Childhood & Youth Studies, in the Department of Education. I'm currently the Co-Deputy Director of the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY), one of the University's twelve 'Centres of Excellence'. 

My primary research interests are democratic schooling, transformative pedagogies and practice, particularly related to climate and ecological education, and I have researched this area in the Global South and North, and in schools, informal education contexts and higher education. This work has included interdisciplinary collaborations with partner organisations and colleagues across the University of Sussex to reconfigure education in ways that might embrace a creative engagement with the existential and uncertain dimensions of climate change and biodiversity loss. I am currently undertaking research in collaboration with Prof. Margaretta Jolly, and Prof. Kate Howland, Dr Jo Walton and Dr Sam Ladkin, on projects that include the use of storytelling to engage with cultural heritages for offering imaginative possibitlies of sustainable futures. 

I am interested in ethnographic and multimodal methodologies, as well as creative-deliberative research-pedagogies. My PhD explored young children’s agency in primary schools, using ethnographic and creative multimodal approaches, and I have 25 years experience researching children and young people's rights, participation, voice and agency. Recently, I worked on a Nuffield-funded project on care-experienced young people's voices, together with Dr Lisa Holmes and Dr Liam Berriman.

My research has gained national media attention, including on BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour, Financial Times, Huffington Post and BBC Newsround.

I am a Fulbright Fellow, having recently been awarded a Global Challenges Teaching Award (Climate Change), and I am a Fellow of the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP). As well as the Co-Deputy Director for the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY), I am a member for Centre for International Education (CIE) and the Centre for Teaching and Learning Research (CTLR) at the University of Sussex. I am on the editorial board of the journal, Forum: for promoting 3-19 comprehensive education.

I am the Course Lead for the BA Childhood and Youth. My undergraduate teaching also includes leading two Forest Food Garden electives, in which students design, grow and harvest a campus forest food garden: the interdisciplinary curriculum explores food systems, the legacies of neo/colonial and agro-industrial extraction, alongside cultural heritages and future imaginaries, to consider more sustainable responses to climage change and ecological disturbance. I also teach on the MA Education and MA Childhood and Youth.

I currently supervise the following doctoral researchers, and I teach thesis writing for the Sussex Research School:

• Tim Coxon 'Navigating grief, hope and existential fear in climate change education: in search of tender discourses of meaning and connection in teacher-child interactions'. 
• Fliss Bull 'Exploring Philosophy with Children as an uncertain pedagogy in uncertain times: a critical posthuman study of materialdiscursive meaning-making within community of enquiry. 
• Kathleen Bailey 'What is nature? Constructing nature with young children in the Anthropocene'
• Kirsty Fraser 'Children and young people’s participation as research advisors: exploring new models of practice.' (CIRCY Scholarship)
• Karen Marwick 'Neoliberal education: shaping subjectivities in education and its influence on self-worth.'

I am based in Essex House (Room 105). Please email for an appointment.