International student mobilities
Over the past two decades, Johanna Waters and I have conducted a wide variety of research projects on different aspects of international student mobilities and processes of internationalisation in higher education more broadly. Our recent publications in this area include Student Migrants and Contemporary Educational Mobilities. Our current research focuses on the UK’s Turing Scheme, and an exploration of the ways in which the concept of ‘the international’ is understood in scholarship on student migration. We are in the process of writing a book, entitled Post-Brexit Educational Mobilities, for Policy Press. With other colleagues, I have guest-edited a special issue of Higher Education on contemporary challenges to international student mobility in Europe.
Supranational higher education spaces
Since November 2020, I have been working with colleagues at UCL and the University of Oxford, as part of the ESRC-funded Centre for Global Higher Education, on a project exploring the supranational space in higher education policy – i.e. the ways in which policy is formed, disseminated and implemented above or beyond nation-states. Lee Rensimer and I have been focussing on the European higher education space, specifically, through work on the European Universities Initiative and the response of various higher education actors across Europe to the war in Ukraine. This develops some themes from my recently-completed European Research Council project on conceptualisations of higher education students across Europe.
Caring practices
I am also interested in caring practices – in relation to education – and amongst families in general. I have published Student Carers in Higher Education, with Marie-Pierre Moreau and Genine Hook and, with Paul Hodkinson, am conducting a longitudinal study of UK fathers who are equal or primary carers for young children, examining how their practices have changed over time, particularly as their children have started school. This builds on our previous work on Sharing Care: Equal and Primary Carer Fathers and Early Years Parenting.
Life Patterns
Finally, I am an international partner on an Australian Research Council-funded project, ‘Life Patterns’ which has been exploring the lives young Australians since the 1990s. This is led by Johanna Wyn at the University of Melbourne.