Description

Marion Walker (formerly Moser) and Amy Burgess will be our new ESRC Post-doctoral Fellows during the coming year. Marion Walker has started her ESRC post-doctoral fellowship earlier this month entitled 'Choice, class and community: the policy implications of educational placelessness'. The study will contribute to understanding class, lifestyle and locale in relation to the educational market place. Marion will be looking in particular at rural primary school choice, school choice in relation to social class in rural areas, spatial relations within the educational market place, and the dynamics of school choice for schools, parents and the Local Authority. Andrew Sayer (Sociology Department) is her mentor. In previous research work, Marion explored the school journey using mobile phone technology on a project led by Duncan Whyatt based in the Department of Geography.

Amy Burgess will join us at the beginning of March. Her main research interest is in literacy as a social practice and has grown out of her experience as an adult literacy educator. Her doctoral research was an ethnographic study of the discoursal construction of writer/student identity in adult literacy educationsupervised by Roz Ivanicat the Linguistics Department at Lancaster.Since finishing her thesis she has been working as a researcher at the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy, which is based at the Institute of Education in London. Mary Hamiltonwill beher mentor and she will also be working with colleagues in the Literacy Research Centre, where she will be based. During the Fellowship year Amy is planning to develop some chapters ofher thesis for publication. She will begin by writing about how people use artefacts, including textual artefacts and spaces, to transfer discourses across timescales within the processes of identity construction.