Research frontiers and improving practices and equity through academic-practitioner-policy collaborations: some experiences from England’s first co-led Centre for Social Mobility
The Centre for Social Mobility at the University of Exeter is the first UK Centre to be jointly led by a ‘widening participation’ practitioner and an academic specialising in equality research in higher education. This provides a fruitful space for conceptualising, undertaking, and communicating research. This talk will present ‘equalities’ frontiers the Centre is researching – namely contextual admissions, elective home-education, rural and coastal disadvantage and ethnic minority progression into postgraduate research degrees. Current and recent theoretical work focuses on ‘possible selves’, ‘helicopter mobility’ and ‘gender equality in fiction – the fiction of gender equality?’.