Title: Enhancing Interdisciplinary Research through Collaborative Training and Knowledge Exchange

This initiative aims to enhance the research ability of my research group by providing training in different disciplinary techniques to students. We plan to collaborate with School of Life Sciences at Sussex University to establish collaborations and get training on Nanotechnologies, as well as with a world-leading tribology research group in Sweden.

Title: Reading Group of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP)

This initiative is about a series of reading group meetings. The participants will meet monthly for one hour. In each meeting, a different participant will volunteer to present a paper he or she has found interesting. The other participants will be asked to read the paper in advance to be able to ask more focused questions. The paper will be a recent one and will be on the frontier of the literature.

Title: ‘The waters of death and life’ - an ethno-graphic novel

This project will build on an existing collaborative partnership with digital illustrator Ben Thomas to turn text-heavy doctoral and post-doctoral ethnographic research that explores identity and belonging among stateless children in Cambodia into an ethno-graphic novel. This collaboration began in 2020 and has been previously funded by an early career small grant from the Association of Southeast Asia Studies UK. Since receiving that grant Ben and I have developed the script for the novel and have been able to demonstrate proof of concept for public consumption.

Title: 3-Day Writing Retreat

To organise and facilitate a 3-day writing workshop/retreat on campus. It will be a space and platform to focus on writing without distractions alongside the support of colleagues in Geography and Global Studies. There will be exercise activities during writing breaks, nourishing lunches and refreshments provided to approximately 20 staff members from Global Studies for the 3 days in the Global Studies Resource Centre.

Title: Sussex University Parent Researchers: Advancing a Culture of Inclusion and Participation in Child Welfare Research

This initiative aims to develop a more inclusive and participatory research culture by integrating the voice of people with lived experience across child welfare research activity from initial conceptualisation to findings dissemination. This initiative builds on efforts across child welfare systems to adopt more inclusive approaches with birth parents to ensure goodness of fit between the needs of their family and what and how support and services are delivered.

In child welfare settings, this includes developing new roles for birth parents with prior child welfare experience who have gone on to make positive life changes, to better understand what worked and how services could be more effective. 

This initiative will work with birth parents with child welfare experience to co-design a parent researcher approach for child welfare research at Sussex University. Local parents with child welfare experience will be recruited to participate in online sessions, both parents with prior child protection concerns (child safeguarding involvement; n=6) and parents with a child with a disability (child in need involvement; n=4).

Title: Support for the Teaching and Learning seminar series for the Business School

The Business School is committed to improving teaching and learning. This has been emphasized many times at the institutional level, and several constructive modifications and enhancements have been implemented. To further this goal, we propose to initiate a new seminar series dedicated to teaching and learning. Seed Fund monies will support travel for external speakers and catering during the seminars.