Next Generation

I'm Alex Bristow and a senior lecturer in Organisational Behaviour as well as the Director of Research degrees for the Faculty of Business and Law.

My research is eclectic and I feel that's a good thing.

I never really wanted to do just one thing.

My joint research comes from throwing together different theories, experiences, questions, problems, etcetera and seeing what emerges out of their connection and interaction.

1 strand that's growing this way concerns careers, academic careers and doing careers differently from established norms and expectations.

Initially it started from my and my friends own struggles against what we saw as unrealistic and damaging neoliberal expectations of what it means to be an academic and a successful academic.

And it grew over more than a decade to become rather an extensive research programme.

So this book is a recent fruit of our labour.

It's an edited compendium of 46 individual and collective autobiographical narratives from academics from all over the world.

21 countries, all inhabited continents, all doing their careers in ways that defy conventions.

It's also written and presented differently.

It's presented as a portrait exhibition with 9 different portrait galleries arranged according to how people do their careers differently.

For example, there is the Meandering gallery, which is this non Euclidean maze that adapts itself to each individual academics in their individual career path.

There is the Transgressive gallery, which is like this beautiful garden here which spills beyond the confines of the academic buildings.

And it includes those academics who transgress boundaries between, for example, academic and non academic work.

There is also the Haunted gallery, where academic ghosts reside, and academic ghosts, academics who leave academic employment but continue to do academic work.

And there are lots more.

There are 9 galleries all together, all arranged according to how people do their careers differently.

So in this way we've gone from our own unhappiness, disenfranchisement and alienation to building a community of like minded people who are able to support each other and offer each other and others hope, inspiration, encouragement and support, and in this small way, help to transform academia into a more welcoming, inclusive, caring and hopeful place.

I'm Doctor Carol Azuma Dennis and I'm a professor in Education Policy and practise at the Open University in the Faculty of well-being Education and Language Studies.

I completed a professional doctorate in Ed D while I was working full time in further education.

Once I completed the Eddie, I realised that I enjoyed being in an academic space so much.

I wanted to carry on researching and I wanted to carry on writing.

I was already doing teacher education as an Fe practitioner, and so it was quite straightforward for me to make a leap from Fe to HE, and I initially entered HE as a teacher educator.

I worked at another university for about 7 or 8 years and then a job came up at the Oakland University as a senior lecturer in leadership and management.

And actually my doctorate was about leading and managing.

And so it was quite easy for me to make that shift to work at the Open University as a senior lecturer.

I really enjoy working in higher education, and so I've really appreciated being able to get involved in all sorts of different projects into research projects, into joint projects, into joint research papers and so on.

And those things have allowed me to build a profile, put me in a position where I could apply for a professorship.

One of the things that I'm quite interested in at the moment is around decolonization and there's a lot of discussion within university, within the sector, around decolonising the curriculum.

But much less attention has been paid to decolonising research methods or research methodologies.

And I'm quite keen to continue working with my colleagues in the faculty, looking at how we embed equity, diversity and inclusion within our approaches to research

Fidel Mutwarasibo is my name.

I'm a senior lecturer in the Business School.

I set off my career as a teacher following forestry training in Kenya.

But I did not last long in teaching.

I moved on after three years and I started working in the voluntary sector as a community organiser.

After the stint in the Community development, I ended up working in relief and emergency and subsequently I moved to Europe and continue to engage with the voluntary sector.

Initially I got a job in Community development, which was related to what I did in Africa, but for progress I needed to do a new challenge and there was an opportunity to work in immigration as an immigration advocate, advocating for the rights of immigrants in Ireland.

So I took on the role and very quickly I became an expert, started getting invited to conferences, different places and after a couple of years a friend of mine asked me if I wasn't an imposter and I said why?

Because obviously you are an expert in migration, but show me your paperwork, which I didn't have.

So that's how I ended up going back to university to do a PhD in sociology to regitimize my expertise as an immigration advocate.

I joined the Open University initially as a visiting research fellow.

The Visiting Research Fellowship eventually tended to consultancy where I worked with people called university doing different tasks of research.

In terms of what I've been doing research wise, I have been interested, again building on the work I've done in the past at looking at how ethnic minorities in particular engage with service providers such as the police, the council, the local authorities.

And this research obviously has highlighted that those authorities sometimes engage, don't engage effectively if those ethnic minorities by, for example, working mainly with some of the people they know as opposed to reaching out and finding the leaders who might be hidden somewhere in plain site.

So through my research, I have been able to unpack the whole myth of some communities being, you know, hard to reach.

But if you know somebody's hard to reach, it means they exist and you can make an effort.

So this work I've been doing as a scholar practitioner, as a procademic, is meant to help the community, to influence it, to bring about change.

And as a consequence of this work and research, I've been able to get involved in producing CPD courses for Thames Valley Police and the British Transport Police and very soon I'll be launching a new project with Liverpool City Region Combined Authority.

This is building also on the work I'm doing in terms of developing leadership among those ethnic minorities through a programme initially called Black Leadership and Empowerment Programme, which recently was rebranded Minority Ethnic Leadership Programme.

And with refunds from Henry Smith Charity, we have been able to deploy this programme in six locations across the Four Nations of the UK.

I'm Emily Bullock and I'm a staff tutor and senior lecturer in creative writing.

I also currently work as Media Fellow for FAST and I focus on Arts and Humanities which involves working with broadcasts and partnerships and open learn to produce new media material, focusing on the faculties, curriculum and research priorities.

Working in higher education is not something I ever really imagined I would do.

I went to six different schools before I took my GCSE and A Levels.

Neither of my parents left school with any qualifications, but my sister went to university as a mature student and I decided that was something I wanted to do too.

So I worked in factories and offices and pubs to put myself through university, and I also completed an MA in 19th century literature at that point.

And I followed that love of plot to work freelance in the film and television industry.

But after a few years, I grew a bit frustrated just working on other people's creative projects and I decided to pursue my own writing and took an MA in Creative Writing.

After I finished that, that was the point at which I joined the Open University as an associate lecturer and found out all about PhDs and what they are and how you do them.

And I did my PhD with the Open University and after that I worked up through academic related staff, tutor into senior lecturer and now Media Fellow where I get to use my past work experience in film and television as well.

My research is based in creative writing.

I've written 2 novels and a collection of short stories.

It's also about sort of the pedagogy of creative writing and the techniques.

But often the research changes.

So when I'm working on historical fiction, I've researched post war London family history, the use of asylums in the 1800s, specifically Bethlehem Hospital.

I've also looked at representations of boxing and literature.

And I'm currently working on a contemporary novel set on the Isle of Wight and some short stories sort of inspired by an open societal challenge, the Coastlines Project, and one of those is about white tailed sea eagles.

My research outputs are actual publications, so they're not peer reviewed, but they are in the world for the public to read and review, which I think is more frightening sometimes.

And it's always evolving, so it's never the same research, it's always something new and I find that really exciting.

I'm Sean Cordell.

I'm a senior lecturer in philosophy and staff tutor here at the Open University.

I got into this many years ago when I was working.

I was working as a chef and I was reading philosophical fiction, so works of novels by mainly the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

And they were, well, the characters in the novels were asking questions that I never occurred to me but left me kind of open mouthed.

So for example, me or so in Camus's The Outsider, near the end is condemned to death and is in his cell.

And he says, well, what does it matter if I die now at 35 or at 85?

And that kind of question just knocked me a bit sideways.

And I kept asking questions about that and about other things.

And I thought the best way to satiate this thirst, as it were, was to go and do some formal study.

And I went to do an Open University foundation course, which I really enjoyed and kept going.

So I did a philosophy degree here at the OU.

After that I was able to give up work and go and do full time study postgraduate at the University of Sheffield and I did a master's and then I did a PhD in ethics or moral philosophy.

From looking at moral philosophy and also political social philosophy very broadly, I became interested in topic of social roles.

What's a social role?

That could be a professional role such as yours or mine as a lecturer, but things like parent or friend or family member.

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And some of the research I've done was has been looking at a sort of conceptual gap between being a good person and having these attributes of character like virtues, you know, integrity and so on.

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The gap between that and just rules of what to not not to do and to do like commandments.

And it seemed that in the Commons code of conduct and in the Lord's that was that gap was there because the code of conduct's got the seven principles of public life, the Nolan principles, which are very broad and asks of people can quite sort of things with, you know, good qualities, integrity, honesty and so on.

And at the other end, there's some very specific commandments, if you like, about about taking donations and things like that.

So in between there's this sort of gap.

The gap is what is the good politicians both do, what is the nature of the role?

What is the the of the MP?

What is it about the MP that that makes that role what it is?

What should you be doing?

And I think we we've tried to identify that gap and say that that's something that should be worked on as to more work needs to be done in that to the point where we actually submitted some evidence for a call for evidence for the Commons, which was accepted.

I am Yosef Araya.

I'm a senior lecturer in the School of Environment, Earth and Ecosystem Sciences.

I started my journey at OU by being a research student which then I followed up by becoming a research fellow and then an associate lecturer.

Further on I also did Open University undergraduate modules and then became a full time central academic.

Right now my roles involve from module team chair to OU academic knowledge exchange and also leading some research work which associated with my three main interests, plants, people and planet.

I started out my career actually in agriculture looking at about the challenge of producing food.

So in my limited view at the time I always assume assumed that food production was probably the primary part of taking care of land.

But slowly I ended up appreciating that the land we use has actually much more benefits than being a producing food.

We need to look at our planet as a whole because we share it with everything else whether it is living things or non living things.

We are at the moment at the Open Universities on Campus Open Living Lab, which is just at the edge of campus and shared with an environment with the local conservation bodies.

And there are various types of trees which are highly monitored with a specific weather station.

And there is also hidden cameras for wildlife trapping and also other cameras to help us detect when plants flower.

So it's a highly monitored site and we use it not only for research but also we use it for students which get to play and work with the data we have here to help enrich their learning.

And also we hope to enable other community members and pupils from the neighbourhood to come and appreciate the nature, learn about it and ultimately take ownership and care for it.

Despite what it looks like a plain green tapestry, actually there is a lot going on in the background here.

Our hidden cameras have picked out wildlife at all hours of the day and night, from foxes to Mount jacks to even otters and various types of insects as well.

And at the same time, our measure of which enables us to monitor water levels in the river, but also how much water the trees are taking.

And we can relate this with the time of the year and the season and all is available to see online as well.

And we have a set of network TV centres here in the visitor centre which people can come and observe.

So there is a lot going on behind what you think is just a green carpet or tapestry.