Professor Rachel Brooks is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Education at Oxford, and a Fellow of Academia Europea and the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences. She is a former President of the British Sociological Association.
Rachel is editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Sociology of Education and co-editor of the ‘Research into Higher Education’ book series, published by Routledge and the Society for Research into Higher Education. She is also a member of the education sub-panel for REF2029, and a former member of the ESRC’s governing council.
Research interests
Student politics and higher education
Rachel leads an ESRC-funded project entitled ‘Does Higher Education Politicise Today’s Students?’. The research, conducted in collaboration with Rille Raaper, Tom Fryer and Franziska Lessky is tracking undergraduates at four UK universities over the course of their studies to examine the impact, if any, of higher education on their political knowledge, views and behaviour. This develops some themes about students as political actors from her recently-completed European Research Council project on conceptualisations of higher education students across Europe, and earlier work, funded by the National Union of Students, on the changing nature of UK students’ unions.
International student mobilities
Over the past two decades, Rachel and Johanna Waters have conducted a wide variety of research projects on different aspects of international student mobilities and processes of internationalisation in higher education more broadly. Their recent publications in this area include Student Migrants and Contemporary Educational Mobilities and Post-Brexit Student Mobilities. Our new edited collection – Fostering Short-Term International Student Mobility – will shortly be published by Routledge. Rachel is also part of an international team examining virtual mobilities through an Open Research Area-funded project.
Rachel has recently guest-edited a special issue of Higher Education on contemporary challenges to international student mobility in Europe and, as part of the ESRC-funded Centre for Global Higher Education, written about intra-European student mobility and the spatial imaginaries facilitated through the European Universities Initiative. In addition, she is examining schemes, across the world, that have been effective in widening participation to international student mobility, through a Churchill Fellowship.
Equity and higher education
Rachel is interested in how you can make access to, and outcomes from, higher education more equitable. She has recently led a Sutton Trust-funded project on ‘Intergenerational Mobility and Higher Education Internationally’ which examined policies to more effectively promote social mobility through higher education.
Other recent work in this area has included research for TASO on widening participation to sandwich courses, in which she has identified various temporal challenges as well as a lack of reliable institutional data.
Caring practices
Rachel has conducted research on caring practices – in relation to education – and amongst families in general. She has published Student Carers in Higher Education, with Marie-Pierre Moreau and Genine Hook and, with Paul Hodkinson, has run 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 their previous work on Sharing Care: Equal and Primary Carer Fathers and Early Years Parenting.
Changes in young people’s lives over time
Finally, Rachel is an international partner on an Australian Research Council-funded project, ‘Life Patterns’ which has been exploring the lives young Australians since the 1990s. As part of this project, she has published on parenting practices with respect to children in higher education, the support given to young people by their parents, and the gendering of work-life balance.
