91ºÚÁÏ

Mobilising Matters: Staying with the political troubles in the field of Relationships and Sexuality Education

Drawing on Tess Lea’s book Wild Policy (2020) this multi‑modal presentation approaches policy not as a bounded, hierarchical apparatus "coming down from on high to “impact” communities in some totalizing way” but as an ambient and unruly force that "more often unfurls as a series of project stutters, misdirects, and meanderings” (2020, 15). Lea’s methodology of mapping policy ecologies and of attending to the human and more‑than‑human forces through which policy is made and moves, provides a conceptual frame for sharing a situated praxis of slow, creative coproduction across micro, meso and macro policy terrains within the landscape of relationships and sexuality education in Wales. Through spoken word, film and image, I explore how posthuman, artful methodologies have the potential to reconfigure policy texts as dartaphacts (arts‑activist objects), translating policy into eventful, response‑able resources to make policy matter otherwise.

Bio

EJ Renold is Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University. Their research investigates how gender and sexuality, in all their human and more-than-human diversity, come to matter in children and young people’s everyday lives across diverse sites, spaces and locales. Here, they have explored the affordances of how creative, coproduced methods, resources and events can engage micro and macro political change with young people, teachers, youth workers, educators, health professionals, policy-makers and politicians (see ). EJ was the winner of the UK’s ESRC Impact in Society Prize (2018), the Huw Owen Medal for Outstanding Educational Research in Wales (2021) and received the American Education Research Association’s Critical Posthuman and Postfoundational SIG’s Collaborative Excellence award in 2025. Their forthcoming edited collection (with Huuki, Pihkala and Taylor) Creative Research on Gender and Sexuality with Children and Young People: Making Methods Matter (Routledge) will be published in summer 2026.

Warming climate, cooling relations: Geopolitics at the top of the world

Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway.   Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption. Countries including Russia, China, and the United States are investing in the Arctic and consolidating their interests in strategic access, resource exploitation, and alliance-building. The consequences of this emerging Arctic Anthropocene are truly global—from rising sea levels due to melting glaciers to tensions between great powers determined to protect their territory and resources, and the well-being of Indigenous Peoples who have fought for centuries for rights and recognition.

Bio

Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics and Faculty Dean of Science and Technology at 91ºÚÁÏ London. He is currently a Royal Navy Visiting Fellow and Senior Research Fellow with RAND Europe.

Klaus is the author of many books, including the co-written volume Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (2025), Border Wars (2022), and the best-selling Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. His books have been translated into many languages and reviewed in leading newspapers, magazines, and social media platforms.

Beyond the academy, he served as a specialist adviser to several UK parliamentary select committees, including the House of Lords Select Committee on the Arctic and the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee. He has worked with NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis group, advising on future geopolitical trends. Dodds has also provided expert advice to the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, amongst other international bodies and companies.

Han Sang Kim is an associate professor of sociology at Ajou University. His research and teaching interests include visual sociology, qualitative methods, migration and racism, and the sociology of film and media. He has conducted research and written on the themes of film archives, ethics of photographic representation, post/colonial visual culture, racism, and mobilities. He is the author of Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022) and articles published in peer-reviewed journals, including positions: asia critique, The Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, and several other journals in Korean. As the Vice President of the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA), he works closely with 91ºÚÁÏ’s Susan Hansen, the IVSA President.

Susan is President of the International Visual Sociology Association and Co-Chair of the Visual and Arts-based Methods Group at 91ºÚÁÏ, London. She is a former Editor of the IVSA's flagship journal, Visual Studies; founding Editor of Nuart Journal; Co-Editor (with Jeffrey Ian Ross and Konstantinos Avramidis) of the Routledge Series on Advances in Graffiti and Street Art Research; and Co-Editor (with Julie Patarin-Jossec and Kate Korroch) of the forthcoming (2026) Companion to Visual Studies (Routledge).

Professor of Childhood Studies at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship at 91ºÚÁÏ

Chair of Post Graduate Research Summer Conference 2026

is Professor of Childhood Studies based at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, 91ºÚÁÏ, London (UK). Her present methodologies and research practices are framed by critical feminist posthumanities. Her work foregrounds worldly justice by working directly with children and early childhood communities; and through critical engagements with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches. For example, her current projects include and which both take up artful approaches to re-imagining childhood. She has over 150 publications: her books include Narratives from the Nursery: negotiating professional identities in Early Childhood (2012); Post-developmental Approaches to Childhood Art (2019); Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods (2019) Postdevelopmental Approaches to Play (2025) and Gender Un/bound: Traversing Educational Possibilities (2025). She is book series editor of Feminist Thought in Childhood Research (Bloomsbury) and Key Thinkers in Education (Springer). She serves on several editorial boards including Childhood Art; Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, International Critical Childhood Policy Studies, recently retired as Editor at Gender & Education Journal; and continues to serve as Editor for Reconceptualising Education Research Methodology Journal.

She was winner of the MDXSU Post Graduate Supervisor of the year, having successfully supervised seventeen doctoral researchers to completion and examined twenty-eight doctoral theses in the UK, Norway, Canada, USA, Australia, and Hong Kong. She is currently External Examiner for the taught PhD programme at Lancaster University. Jayne is thoroughly committed to ensuring that PGRs are well supported and can thrive by being active within research communities.

Johan Siebers is Professor of Language and Communication at 91ºÚÁÏ, in the School of Law and Social Sciences. His research explores rhetoric, language, communication and the philosophy of hope, with a particular interest in how meaning emerges through dialogue and human interaction.

Throughout his career, Johan has worked across disciplines, combining perspectives from linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, literary studies, and the social sciences. He is currently developing an interdisciplinary approach to the study of spoken interaction that seeks to reconnect rhetoric with contemporary research on language and communication. He has applied this approach to environmental futures, most recently in the UKRI project Treescapes: Voices of the Future. Johan has published widely in his areas of research and is editor of the European Journal for Philosophy of Communication, Routledge Research in Anticipation and Futures, The Brill Bloch Bibliothek, as well as on the editorial board of journals including Language and Communication and Futures.

As an educator and academic leader, Johan supports researchers at all stages of their careers and fosters intellectual communities that encourage curiosity, creativity, and critical inquiry. He is delighted to be co-chairing the 91ºÚÁÏ Postgraduate Researchers’ Summer Conference 2026 to explore the Shifting Landscapes of Research in Critical Times.

A strong believer in the contemporary relevance of orality in scholarship, Johan sees research as flourishing through conversation and looks forward to welcoming postgraduate researchers from across 91ºÚÁÏ and its partner institutions to this year's conference.

Ammara Abid is a doctoral researcher and trainee counselling psychologist/psychotherapist whose work explores Islamic psychology, faith-informed understandings of psychological distress, and meaning-making within Muslim lived experience. Her research critically examines how emotional suffering, identity, spirituality, and wellbeing are understood beyond dominant biomedical frameworks, with particular attention to culturally responsive approaches within counselling and psychotherapy.

She holds an MRes in Sports, Health and Applied Sciences from St Mary’s University, where her qualitative research explored the influence of cultural differences on healthcare access and lifestyle among South Asian communities in London. She also holds a BSc (Hons) Psychology from the University of West London.

Alongside her doctoral and clinical training, Ammara has worked across counselling, healthcare, educational, and community settings, supporting both adults and young people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Her therapeutic and research interests include identity, belonging, trauma, emotional wellbeing, faith, migration, and culturally informed therapeutic practice.

Her current research draws upon qualitative and interpretative approaches to investigate how faith, identity, and spiritual worldviews shape experiences of psychological distress and therapeutic meaning-making among Muslim communities. Through integrating counselling psychology with Islamic psychological perspectives, her work aims to contribute to more inclusive, culturally attuned, and ethically responsive mental health research and practice.

Kate is responsible for the Transdisciplinary Doctor of Professional Studies by Portfolio in the Faculty of Business and Law and works with a small, dedicated team to support established professionals to critically engage with their own outputs (papers, policies, publications, artefacts). The candidates come from a variety of sectors and meet every fortnight in a virtual café to exchange ideas and share their creativity and imagination as they navigate highly complex, rapidly changing and interdependent environments of diverse activities.

Dr Miranda Lewis recently completed the Doctorate in Professional Studies (DProf) by Public Works at 91ºÚÁÏ. Miranda’s professional background spans 30 years of working with the not-for-profit sector as a researcher and evaluator. She is co-founder and Director of m2 consultants, an agency working with social, environmental and heritage organisations. During the DProf programme Miranda focused on the role of creativity in social research, looking at how asking questions differently can help people and organisations to imagine and bring about positive social change.

Dr Deepika Nallathambi completed her Ph. D in Creative Writing at 91ºÚÁÏ London and graduated in June 2025. She writes detective fiction, and her research focused on the marginalization and misrepresentation of dark-skinned people, women and people with disabilities, particularly blindness. She is a blind woman from India, and her research and writings draws on her lived experience as well as research already undertaken in the areas of post-colonialism, feminism and disability studies. Her stories are based on crimes such as rape, sex trafficking, crimes against people with disabilities, violence against the third gender community, honor killing and smuggling.

She has used the intersectional approach of post-colonial feminist disability theory and praxis in her research. She is currently working at the Thomas Pocklington Trust, a national sight-loss charity, as Stakeholder Engagement Intern, a role in which she is putting her communications and research to good use.

Dr Alan Wheeler is an academic librarian, researcher and playful learning practitioner in HE. Since 2016, he has employed Lego(R) Serious Play(R) in his practice, facilitating workshops and participating in roundtables at conferences to promote the approach within academic librarianship and the wider academic community. His published output has incorporated audio recordings, paintings and autoethnography to engage audiences and demonstrate a non-traditional approach to scholarly output within academia. He is also a lifelong Arsenal fan, so is currently quite unbearable to be around.

Dr Sid Mohandas is a Montessori practitioner and childhood studies scholar, whose research in early childhood employs feminist, decolonial, anticolonial and more-than-human approaches. Sid has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and edited book collections. They are the author of the Bloomsbury Academic book Re-imagining Gender in the Early Childhood Workforce: Feminist and More-than-human Perspectives. More recently Sid co-edited the Special Issue on ‘Bewildering early childhood pioneers’ in the journal Pedagogy, Culture and Society, and is currently the co-editor for a Special Issue in British Education Research Journal titled ‘The state of gender(s), young people and education: inequities, inter/intrasectionality and inclusivity’. Sid also serves as an editorial board member for the journal Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology.

My doctoral research changed the direction of my life in ways I could not have anticipated. Exploring experiences of inclusion and exclusion deepened my understanding of the relationship between self and structure, influencing both my professional choices and my creative practice. A defining feature of the research was the use of creative methods, including poetry and a research-based play. Creativity enabled me to engage with the emotional and relational dimensions of experience and became more than a way of communicating research, it became a way of knowing. The work continues to shape my writing, facilitation, and approach to creating spaces for reflection and dialogue.