I joined the School of Education as Lecturer in Education Studies in January 2025. Since qualifying as a teacher in 2004, I have held teaching, leadership, and advisory roles in primary education in the UK and internationally. Between 2016-23, I worked towards my PhD at Durham University whilst in role as a school leader in Tokyo and teacher educator at York St John University.  

My research interests and publications centre around philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives of education. I have a particular interest in new materialism as an approach to exploring what constitutes and characterises teachers’ practices. My new materialist projects have included ethnographic study of how education policy is translated into existing practices, exploration of the educational mode of existence in forest school settings, and research into the role of digital technologies in classroom interaction. Current projects include sole authorship of a book Socio-materialism and the Study of Classroom Practices for the Bloomsbury series Social Theory and Methodology in Education Research and co-editing the BERA Guide to Place-Responsive Pedagogy in Outdoor Learning.

I am part of the organising committee for the annual Oxford Ethnography and Education Conference and a member of the International Teacher Education Research Collective (ITERC).

My research focuses on exploring how education and its practices are imagined and constituted. This work enables me to conceptualise and explain the many influences upon how 'education' is perceived and shaped in different contexts. I have a keen interest in the philosophy of education, particularly in new materialist perspectives of educational practices and post-structuralist theories of existence. I explore these philosophical interests in both theoretical papers and empirical research in schools and other education settings. My empirical work is largely ethnographic, an approach which supports an in-depth, fine-grain view of the lived experience of education in its various forms. Other research interests include considering education through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and exploring the potential and challenges to education of place-responsive pedagogy.

Prior publications

I currently teach on the Masters in Education Studies and supervise dissertation work on this programme.

Prizes, awards & distinctions

• 2024: Senior Fellowship (Higher Education Academy)

Editorial boards

• 2021: International Teacher Education Research Collective Book Editorial Board
• 2023: Oxford Ethnography and Education Conference Committee

Professional & learned societies

• 2016: Member, British Educational Research Association
• 2020: Member, Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

Selected international presentations

• 2024: ECER (Towards a Weak Ontology of Education: A Conversational Approach to Bojesen)
• 2022: Oxford Ethnography in Education Conference (Keynote: The Voice of Google: An ethnography of the role of cloud-based collaborative technologies in the formation of classroom practices.)
• 2024: Exploring Educational Leadership and Policy through Actor-Network Theory (A new mode of control:​ An Actor-Network Theory account of effects of power and agency in establishing education policy​ ​)