Lisa is an anti-disciplinary scholar and methodologist, with experience of working within and across the subject areas of Education, Urban Studies, Philosophy, Public Policy, Criminology and Sociology. Her work across these sites focuses on practices of knowledge production and meaning-making, and seeks to engage within the relationships between dominant knowledge structures, acts and practices, and marginalised ways of knowing and being, including within higher education.

Her PhD explored the naturalisation of time within the subject area of Urban Studies and its limiting effect on temporal imaginations within the discipline and bordering disciplinary and academic practices. A more recent project, Justice Journeys, used arts-based methods to work with survivors of rape to explore and share their experiences of justice within and beyond the criminal justice system. This work was awarded the University of Glasgow’s Best Community & Public Engagement award in 2021. She is currently PI/Co-PI on a number of grants, including: Kitchen Life, Diversifying Justice, and Researchers Don’t Cry?!

Her work is theoretically grounded in post-qualitative inquiry and guided through readings with/in post-structural, post-colonial, post-humanist, new materialist, assemblage, STS and affect theories. She is experienced in designing and using a wide range of critical, performative and transformative methodological approaches, including (auto)ethnography, participatory research, research-creation methods, speculative worlding, and arts-based methodologies.

Underpinning all that she does is a view that theory and method should be treated as tools to prise apart dominant knowledge practices, towards realities unseen, and towards undisciplinary modes of thinking and doing. To this end she considers academia a potent site for exploration in and of itself and she relatedly engages in alternative modes of scholarship as practices of critique and resistance, exercising slow, community-based and anti-colonial methods within her everyday academic practice. To this end she is just as at home (re)imagining the world through craft and making. She is particularly partial to crochet, sewing and quilting as means to connect the head, the heart, and the hand. Her written PhD thesis was accompanied by a hand-embroidered, patchwork quilt.

In the spirit of Georges Perec, she likes to question her teaspoons. Following Donna Haraway, she continually asks: with whose blood were my eyes crafted? And she remains ever optimistic in the potential of imaginative acts. In the words of Marnie Stern: see how easy to dream a scheme of sounds in your head. We must dream on.

Academic cultures of knowledge production

Researcher education

Creative, arts-based and post-qualitative methods

Situated knowledge/learning practices

Speculative worlding practices

Marginalised, subjugated and peripheral epistemologies

Ontological politics

List by: Type | Date

[PI] Co-creating Zines with students to explore their university social experience in pandemic times. May 2021. Chancellor’s Fund, University of Glasgow. With [Co-I] Barbara Read. £405.

[Co-PI] Diversifying Justice: Revealing viable pathways for South Asian women. May 2021-December 2022. Scottish Government, Justice Analytical Services. With [Co-PI] Nughmana Mirza. £48,603.

[Co-PI] Emotions and Fieldwork: Locating, articulating, navigating, doing emotions in the field. April 2021. Sociology small grants and SCCJR Development Fund. With [Co-PI] Nughmana Mirza. £2,342.

[PI] Kitchen Life: Towards Clean Cooking Services in Bangladesh and Malawi. January 2021-September 2021. Global Challenges Research Fund, Scottish Funding Council. With [Co-Is] Raihana Ferdous; Manosh Paul; Meghna Gupta (freelance documentary filmmaker: London); Deepa Pullanikkatil, (Abundance Worldwide: Malawi); Mazharul Islam (University of Science and Technology: Bangladesh). £74,176.

Researchers Don’t Cry! Meeting. June 2020. Sociology Small Grants competition, University of Glasgow. With Nughmana Mirza. £648.

Recrafting ethnography: Crime, Harm and Control in the 21st Century.Two-day conference, Glasgow. June 2019. SCCJR, University of Glasgow. With Alistair Fraser and Phil Thomas. £1,920.

[Co-I] Justice Journeys: Survivor Stories. 2017-18. ESRC Impact Acceleration Award. With [PI] Michele Burman and [Co-I] Oona Brooks-Hay. £20,291.

[Co-I] Justice Journeys: informing policy and practice through lived experience. Scottish Government, Justice Analytical Services. 2017-18. With [PI] Oona Brooks-Hay and [Co-I] Michele Burman. £37,752.

Problematising resilience: Caring for ourselves and others as early career academics. ECR Workshop, University of Glasgow. April 2017. Regional Early Career Event Fund, British Sociological Association. With Joanne Neary and Susan Berridge (Stirling University). £935.

Developing safe research practices through consideration of the emotional impacts of social research.PGR and ECR one-day workshop, University of Leeds. September 2016. LEAP Skills Hub, University of Leeds. With Joanne Neary and Anna Tarrant (University of Leeds). £798. 

Risk in fieldwork: Negotiating the physical and emotional affects of social research. PGR and ECR one-day workshop, University of Glasgow. April 2016. New Initiatives Funding, University of Glasgow. With Joanne Neary and Anna Tarrant. £963.

[PI] Traditional Boat Building in Scotland: preserving the past, Conserving a Future. 2016-17. Historic Environment Scotland and GalGael Trust. £9,000.

[Co-I] Cultural Communication in the Public Interest. Creative Scotland, Communication and Engagement. 2014-15. With [PI] Gesa Helms and [Co-I] Leigh French (Variant, Glasgow). £5,460.

[Co-I] The Impact of Large-Scale Regeneration on Community Attachments to Place. 2011-12. Urban Studies Research Incentivisation Fund and Adam Smith Research Foundation. With [PI] Rebecca Madgin and [Co-I] Annette Hastings. £3,000.

[PI] Ignite Theatre: Good Relations Project Evaluation. 2012. European Human Rights Council and West Integration Network. £2,500.

1+3 PhD Studentship. 2010-14. Urban Studies Foundation. £68,000 + Fees.

I am very happy to hear from students interested in supervision blending educational concerns with post-qualitative, post-colonial, post-humanist inquiry, new materialist inquiries; students interested in the use of innovative, participatory, arts-based, speculative and research-creation methods, particularly within community, non-formal or public educational spaces; and students exploring arts-based and public pedagogies for transformative ends. If you have a project that you think may be of interested, please do get in touch.

• Black, Elizabeth
  Exploring the support networks of modern apprentices in the Scottish childcare workforce
• Dai, Qiao
  How Chinese women in British Higher Education make sense of womanhood.
• Hsieh, Sih Ying
  Exploring the Art-informed Approach for People Living with Dementia: Arts on Prescription in Taiwan
• Malt, Michael
  Living Through Assessment: Towards a working-class lived experience understanding of assessment in HE
• Perry, Dan
  Orientating Higher Education Curriculum Development:
• Vaniev, Alexander
  Exploring sociomaterial practices and core (f)actors contributing to early career academic teacher development: an actor-network theory perspective
• Wu, Han
  Exploring the Application and Assessment Practice Of Drama in Education in China

I lead the MSc programme Education for Sustainable Futures in Adult, Community and Youth Contexts.

I specialise in teaching reserach theory and methods, particularly modes that are culturally and socially responsive. I currently lead Contemporary Research Theory and Methods (MSc Educational Studies for Adult, Community and Youth Contexts AND MSc Museum Education), and in the past have worked closely with colleagues on the BA Community Development, leading the courses Introduction to Research (3rd year) and Approaches and Applied Research (4th year, honours).

I also teach research workshops for conferences, events and in non-academic spaces, inluding sessions on disruptive methods, creative/arts-based approaches, autoethnography, reserach-creation, and performative research.