Alice Willatt is an interdisciplinary social science researcher. Broadly speaking Alice’s work contributes to the fields of Education, Ageing Studies, Social and Cultural Geography, and Organisation Studies. Her research seeks to deepen understandings of how structural injustices, particularly relating to the intersections of gender, race and class, shape experiences of education, ageing, and participation in social and cultural life. Alice is interested in how such injustices mediate everyday life across space and time, and she looks to the generative potential of everyday acts of subversion and refusal, exploring how these might serve as the material and affective makings of just futures.
Alice’s research draws widely on feminist praxis and theories of care, public pedagogies and spatial justice. She is drawn to the politically reconstructive commitments of these frameworks, particularly in the context of her most recent work on the Reparative Futures of Education (Repair-Ed) project.
Alice is committed to working with creative, participatory methods in her research and teaching. In recent years she has developed care-full approaches to participatory research and co-designs that are attentive to issues of power, positionality and voice, and responsive to the situated knowledges and lifeworlds of the people with whom she researches. Alice is particularly interested in thinking through the complexity and challenges that arise in participatory methodologies and negotiating the limits and constraints of participation in different contexts.
Alice’s research has brought her into collaboration with children, young people, older adults and intergenerational groups. She has worked as a researcher in both academic and public sector settings, and holds experience in policy engagement, and partnership working with schools, civil society organisations, activist groups, public sector bodies and policymakers.