Jenna Mittelmeier
Lead Coordinator
Senior Lecturer in International Education

Bio: Jenna’s research focuses broadly on the internationalisation of higher education through a critical and decolonial lens. She is particularly interested in practices with international students and their treatment within universities, by host societies, through immigration policies and structures, and in the scholarly literature written about them. She is also curious about universities as places and spaces, how campus spaces shape interactions, and the university’s spatial positioning within their host cities.
Keywords: internationalisation, international students, educational mobility, visa regimes, immigration structures, space and spatialities

Sylvie Lomer
Coordinator
Professor of Global Higher Education

Bio: Sylvie’s research explores international/global higher education. She particularly focuses on global inequalities, international students in policy and academic practice, and on how these are constructed in the academic literature. She adopts a critical, decolonial lens in most of her work, focusing on how power structures international dynamics of higher education.
Keywords: policy, international students, international student mobility, discourse, inequalities

Jess Gagnon
Coordinator
Lecturer in Education

Bio: Jessica is a sociologist of higher education whose research is primarily focused on inequalities, including by gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and social class. Her recent research has specifically focused on inequalities in STEM and she has received funding from NERC, EPSRC, and RSC. She has worked in higher education in the US and UK for more than 25 years. Jessica is a first-generation student from an American working-class, single mother family.
Keywords: STEM; gender; sexualities; disabilities; social class; race/ethnicity; first generation; widening participation

Tom Fryer
Coordinator
Lecturer in Education

Bio: Tom’s research focuses on opportunities to transform inequitable education systems. His recent work has included access to university (contextual admissions and UCAS personal statements), graduate outcomes, elite private education, and student politics. His work adopts realist-informed mixed methods approaches.
Keywords: widening participation, university access, inequality, university admissions, private education

Charlie Deeks
PhD Representative

Bio: Charlie’s research examines the role of narrative components of admissions processes to higher education, and how those processes impact students from under-resourced backgrounds. He also has a keen comparative interest in British and American admissions systems, especially with regard to holistic and contextualised admissions policies.
Keywords: widening participation, university access, inequality, university admissions, holistic admissions

Loretta Anthony-Okeke
Senior Lecturer in Education

Bio: Loretta’s scholarship is situated within critical international education with a focus on curriculum justice, epistemic equity and Global Majority knowledge across further, sixth-form and higher education in UK, Nigerian and Global Majority contexts. Grounded in anti-deficit pedagogy, Afrocentric epistemologies and cultural wealth frameworks, she employs creative, digital and participatory methodologies to examine student experiences. Her work explores how curriculum, pedagogy and institutional practices shape access, belonging and student success for historically underrepresented and marginalised communities. This research informs curriculum design, assessment and policy across post-compulsory education.
Keywords: curriculum justice; epistemic equity; anti-deficit pedagogy; international education

Alex Baratta
Reader in Language and Education

Bio: Alex’s research takes an applied linguistics approach, focused on linguistic prejudice; linguistic rights; and language and identity, all within educational settings. This has included work on accent bias within British teaching; recognition for World Englishes in assessment, including China and Korean Englishes; and some outlier work, such as military impoliteness and visual pedagogy.
Keywords: Accent; accent bias; World Englishes; linguistic prejudice

Heather Cockayne
Senior Lecturer in International Education

Bio: Heather’s research explores international and transnational higher education, with particular interests in belonging, equity and student experience. She researches transnational higher education and how students experience and navigate educational spaces across cultural and institutional contexts. Her work uses creative and participatory methods, including photography and visual approaches. She also researches digital pedagogy and inclusive, accessible and culturally responsive approaches to higher education.
Keywords: International Students, TNE, EDI, Spaces, Digital Pedagogy

Martyn Edwards
Lecturer in Education

Bio: Martyn’s research explores the relationships between educational practice, learner development, technology, and social theory.  More recently, his research has focused on AI literacy, assessment in AI-rich educational environments, digital education, and critical approaches to emerging technologies, including collaborative projects involving Global South higher education contexts. His scholarship seeks to bridge theory and practice, producing research that informs teaching, curriculum design, and educational policy.
Keywords: AI and Assessment, Higher Education, Mixed Methodologies, AI Literacy, Social Theory

Linda Evans
Professor of Education

Bio: Focused on working life in education contexts, Linda researches, inter alia: professionalism, professional development, academic development and researcher development, educational leadership, university professors and the European professoriate, and work-related attitudes – specifically, morale, job satisfaction and motivation. Linda has authored some ninety academic papers and eight books, and is currently working on her ninth. Her theoretical perspectives and conceptual models are increasingly applied by other researchers as analytical frames, and she has disseminated her work orally through numerous keynotes in the UK and overseas.
Keywords: professors, professoriate, researcher development, research leadership, academic working life, French higher education

Kirsty Finn
Senior Lecturer in Education

Bio: Kirsty is a sociologist of Higher Education, youth transitions and gender. Her work addresses the broader context of students’ personal lives and (im)mobilities (e.g. part-time working and side hustles; relationships with family, friends and place; leaving home, commuting; and feelings of wellbeing and belonging). Kirsty’s research also focuses on graduate employment and employability and the ways in which student experiences are shaped by the processes of financialisation and philanthropic giving.
Keywords: students; belonging; part-time work; graduate employment; gender; feminist theory; philanthropy

Andrew Gunn
Lecturer in Education

Bio: Andrew’s work addresses a range of topics including measuring the performance of universities and the activities that take place within them, curriculum design in higher education, the idea of ‘teaching excellence’ in theory and in practice, the status of teaching relative to research in the academy, university alliances such as the European Universities Initiative, research impact, the relationship between universities and the state, and theoretically informed analyses of education public policy.
Keywords: teaching excellence in higher education; university alliances; curriculum, education policy; education and the state; public policy

Sadia Habib
Senior Lecturer in Education

Bio: Sadia’s interdisciplinary research examines how race, religion and belonging are negotiated across higher education and cultural institutions. Focusing on racialised and diasporic communities, she explores representation, curricula, institutional inequality and the experiences of students. Using critical pedagogy alongside participatory, decolonial and arts-based methods, she works with young people as co-researchers to challenge dominant narratives and advance anti-racist practice. Her university–museum collaborations investigate how inclusive learning spaces can foster agency, dialogue and social change. Her co-founding of The Riz Test also connects scholarship with practical change across education, culture, film and television, while promoting more equitable forms of representation.
Keywords: identity, belonging, heritage, anti-racism, Islamophobia, culture, social justice, creative research methods, diaspora, representation, decoloniality, multilingualism, literacy, literature

Rui He
Senior Lecturer in International Education

Bio: Working as a cross-cultural psychologist, Rui’s research interests and publications focus on international students’ acculturation experiences, bio-ecological development and (im)mobility trajectories during transitions into young adulthood. She particularly focuses on social connections and wellbeing within and beyond campus;  language, culture, and identity at workplaces and in intercultural communities. She is also passionate about exploring how everyday and seemingly mundane aspects of life can reveal forms of invisible learning.
Keywords: international students, acculturation, (im)mobility, young adulthood transition, social connection and wellbeing, employability, placement, language, culture, identity, intercultural communities, invisible learning

Zhuomin Huang
Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Education

Bio: Min’s research focuses on critical intercultural education and the experiences of students in higher education. She is particularly interested in how students negotiate their identities, wellbeing and belonging, and in challenging epistemic injustices and reductive essentialism in research and educational practice. Her work also explores creative and multilingual approaches to researching student experiences and supporting more inclusive higher education practices.
Keywords: critical intercultural education, students, student experience, language and epistemic justice, multilingual research, creative methods, inclusive higher education

Steve Jones
Professor of Higher Education

Bio: Steve is researching how market systems in higher education affect staff and students. He uses Critical Discourse Analysis (a method to study how language shapes power and social life) to see how rules are made and shared, and his current work focuses on university governance. He is an executive member of the Council for the Defence of the British University (CDBU) and a former Director of Manchester Institute of Education. His books include Universities Under Fire (Palgrave, 2022), and he wrote the Code of Ethical University Governance (CDBU, 2025).
Keywords: university governance; critical discourse analysis; HE policy; academic and PS staff identity; student finance

Miguel Antonio Lim
Senior Lecturer in Education and International Development

Bio: Originally from the Philippines, Miguel’s research interests include internationalisation of higher education, Southeast Asian and ‘Global South’ HE, transnational higher education (TNE), university rankings, partnerships. Building on professional practice, he is interested in the links between policy, practice, and research.
Keywords: international higher education, higher education policy, Global South / Global Majority HE, rankings, transnational education

Eric Lybeck
Senior Lecturer in Education

Bio: Eric is a historical sociologist of knowledge and education researching the development of universities, professions and civic institutions. His current project, Civic Reconstruction, examines how places sustain and renew the capacity for meaningful work, learning and cultural life. He is particularly interested in universities’ civic roles, regional inequalities in access to knowledge, and how craft and professional judgement develop through practice, including in the context of AI. His work draws on processual sociology, civic traditions and social generativity, connecting historical and comparative research with practical institution-building.
Keywords: historical sociology; sociology of knowledge; civic universities; regional inequality; civic institutions; craft and professional judgement; AI and education; social generativity

Huran Mirillo
Senior Tutor in Education

Bio: Huran works at the intersection of international education, TESOL and digital education. Her work explores international academics’ experiences of epistemic and digital belonging, with a particular focus on language, power and inclusion. She is interested in how AI and digital practices can support more socially just and inclusive educational spaces in higher education institutions.
Keywords: international academics; epistemic belonging; digital belonging; language, power and inclusion; AI inclusion and belonging, social justice

Maria Pampaka
Professor (MIE and Social Statistics)

Bio: Maria is a social statistician exploring educational inequalities, learning, and student trajectories across educational settings. Her research in HE has focused on examining student learning gain, transitions and outcomes, including leading a HEFCE-funded learning gain pilot project and collaborating with others in financial self-efficacy (FSE) measures. Based in Social Statistics and the Manchester Institute of Education at the University of Manchester, she applies quantitative and mixed-methods approaches, including psychometrics, Rasch modelling, and multilevel and longitudinal analysis, to understand students’ experiences, attitudes and outcomes.
Keywords: quantitative methods, transitions to HE, measurement, self-efficacy

Josef Ploner
Senior Lecturer in International and Comparative Education

Bio: Josef is a cultural anthropologist researching how education, learning, and mobility intersect in inter- and transnational higher education. He is particularly interested in international student mobilities, how they tie in with migration, travel, and diaspora, and relate to placemaking and cultures of welcoming in diverse HE environments. Based on his interest in informal, place-based, and civic education, Josef has also a keen interest in tourism, heritage and the cultural industries as sites of learning, memory formation and cultural contest.
Keywords: international students; student migration and mobility; informal and place-based learning; educational travel and tourism

Pauline Prevett
Reader in Education

Bio: Pauline is a methodologist actively developing new qualitative methods of analysis. Her research focuses on students’ financial identity and financial self-efficacy, students’ educational journeys, as well as qualitative and mixed-methods research. She also develops qualitative analysis software and digital tools to support research methods pedagogy in higher education.
Keywords: computational qualitative methods, financial literacy, doctoral students, research methods pedagogy, methodology

Haleema Sadia
Lecturer in International Education

Bio: Haleema’s research explores international postgraduate students’ transitions into UK higher education, with a particular focus on identity, belonging and inclusion. Drawing on sociocultural theory and the concept of figured worlds, her work develops creative visual methods, including photo-elicitation, timelines, concept-mapping interviews and Ketso, as tools for generating, analysing and presenting qualitative data. She is also a specialist in using NVivo for qualitative and mixed methods analysis. She co-created the University’s NVivo training resource and teaches NVivo to postgraduate researchers across the UK. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Keywords: international students; transition; identity and belonging; inclusion; visual methods; photo-elicitation; concept mapping; NVivo; qualitative methods

Paul Smith
Lecturer in Education

Bio: Paul’s lasting research interest is in academic writing, studying this from various practice perspectives. He also has interests in higher education policy and practice, in particular with regard to teaching, learning, and assessment. Where possible, he uses methods derived from pragmatism, natural language philosophy, conceptual analysis, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.
Keywords: Academic writing; policy; teaching, learning, and assessment

David Spendlove
Professor of Education

Bio: David’s work focuses on strengthening the relationship between research, scholarship and educational practice across schools, teacher education and higher education. His research examines how educational ideas, evidence and innovation are translated into teaching, curriculum and institutional development, with a particular interest in research-informed practice and conceptual stewardship. Through collaboration with practitioners, teacher educators and university colleagues, he seeks to ensure that research not only advances knowledge but also contributes meaningfully to educational improvement.
Keywords: Research-informed teaching, TEF, teaching excellence, creativity and design education, teacher education and professional learning, education politics

Kathryn Telling
Lecturer in Education

Bio: Kathryn is a sociologist researching the different, and sometimes conflicting, values that animate higher education, and how they are understood by students and staff. She has studied values in relation to a number of empirical topics including disciplines and interdisciplinarity, graduate skills, and intellectual elitism. She is especially interested in the idea of fairness as it is put to work in different ways in different contexts.
Keywords: educational values, sociology of education, elitism, social class, interdisciplinarity, fair judgement

Ümit Kemal Yıldız
Senior Lecturer in Education

Bio: Ümit previously taught in prison education and spent fourteen years in further education, specialising in citizenship education and training educators to teach active citizenship. His research brings together grassroots anti-racist and anti-fascist activism with academic inquiry, informed by transformative radical pedagogy and anti-racist teaching. His recent work critically examines ‘fundamental British values’ and the UK government’s Prevent strategy through an anti-racist lens.
Keywords: anti-racism, anti-fascism, radical pedagogy, Prevent, British values

Skye Xin Zhao
Lecturer in GenAI for Education

Bio: Skye’s research focuses on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education, exploring AI adoption, user perspectives, policies, and governance, with particular emphasis on the digital divide, equity, inclusion, and the experiences of marginalised learner communities. Her work examines how AI can enhance educational opportunities while addressing inequalities in access, skills, and institutional support. She is an AI Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Institute of Teaching and Learning (ITL) and a Senior Fellow at the Microsoft AI Economy Institute, where her research focuses on AI competency development, capacity building, and the global diffusion of AI skills.
Keywords: AI in Higher Education, Digital Divide, AI Governance and Policy, International Student Mobility and Experience, AI Competency Development, Equity and Inclusion

Khemara Chhorn

Bio: Khemara, from Cambodia, is a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on Qatar’s Cultural Diplomacy, exploring how small states use cultural engagement to build relationships and project influence beyond their region. She is interested in the role of people-to-people exchange and bilateral cultural initiatives in shaping foreign policy. Her work draws on Qatar’s growing cultural partnerships with key Asian countries, examining how these programmes reflect the broader ambitions of Qatar’s national vision.
Keywords: Culture, Diplomacy, Soft Power, International Relations, Qatar, Middle East, Asian Countries, Small State Diplomacy