It's Just Research

In this episode of It’s Just Research, hosts Dr Sara Black and Liam Cini O’Dwyer speak with Dr Simon Gibbons about child-centred approaches to teaching English and the importance of making education meaningful to students’ own lives and experiences.Simon discusses the history of progressive English teaching and also reflects on his own journey from studying science to specialising in English education and his long-standing interest in how children learn.

In this episode of It’s Just Research, hosts Dr Sara Black and Liam Cini O’Dwyer are joined by Dr Carla Finesilver to explore how students learn mathematics, and how the way we represent maths shapes that learning. While children often encounter maths through everyday experiences like sharing and problem-solving, classroom maths can quickly become formal and procedural. Carla discusses how this shift towards symbols and standardised methods can limit creativity and disengage many learners.You can read more about Carla’s research in her recent paper: Beyond categories: Dynamic qualitative analysis of visuospatial representation in arithmetic

Dr Sara Black speaks with Professor Chris Winch about informal education and the ways we learn outside formal schooling.Drawing on his recent book Civil Society’s Education, Chris explains how children develop language, behaviour, values, and practical skills through participation in family and community life, learning through experience, imitation, and shared activity rather than formal teaching.The conversation also explores how social practices such as promise-keeping, loyalty, and shared norms are sustained through participation and mutual recognition, and reflects on the tension between social conditioning and human freedom.Civil Society’s Education Reflections on the Informal Roots of Learning was published in 2025 by Bloomsbury.

In the first episode of Season Three, hosts Dr Sara Black and Liam Cini O’Dwyer speak with Dr Billy Holzberg about his award-winning book Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and the Emotional Politics of Migration Control.Drawing on his research in Gender Studies, Billy explores how emotions are not simply private feelings but powerful forces that shape political life. Introducing the concept of affective bordering, he shows how empathy, fear, anger and hope work together to construct boundaries between those seen as deserving of care and those positioned as threats.Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and the Emotional Politics of Migration Control received the 2025 British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

In the final episode of Season Two, hosts Dr Sara Black and Dr Pippa Sterk speak with Dr Panos Theodoropoulos about his upcoming book 'The Precarious Migrant Worker,' which explores how migrant workers come to internalise precarity in the UK’s low-wage economy.Drawing from his own experience working in factories, warehouses and restaurant kitchens, Panos blends theory with vivid ethnography to unpack why precarious migrant workers are so difficult to organise—and what’s at stake when labour is tied to migration status.The conversation explores the tension between being seen as either a ‘thief’ or a ‘cash cow’, and how migrant workers are often labelled as these metaphors. Together, the hosts and guest reflect on the institutional forces that shape working lives, the costs of resistance, and the power of telling stories from inside the system.The Precarious Migrant Worker by Dr Panos Theodoropoulos will be released in Spring 2025Follow us: 📸 Instagram: @itsjustresearchpodcast 🐦 Twitter: @justresearchpod 📧 Email: justresearch-ecs@kcl.ac.uk 🌐 Website: kcl.ac.uk/its-just-research-an-ecs-podcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, hosts Dr Sara Black and Dr Pippa Sterk speak with Dr Tania de St Croix and Louise Doherty about their research into how youth work is being reshaped by impact measurement and policy reform.Having started off as youth workers, both Tania and Louise journeyed into academia through their desire to research the field within which they worked, which has been the subject of continual budget cuts and changes implemented by policy. They joined forces on the research project ‘Rethinking impact, evaluation and accountability in youth work’ in 2017.Drawing on their article “Embers and Fragments,” they reflect on the pressures of proving value in a field rooted in trust, relationships, and voluntary participation. Together, they challenge the rise of a deficit-based model that demands evidence from marginalised young people, and explore how creative, critical research can help protect the future of youth work.Follow us:📸 Instagram: @itsjustresearchpodcast🐦 Twitter: @justresearchpod📧 Email: justresearch-ecs@kcl.ac.uk🌐 Website: kcl.ac.uk/its-just-research-an-ecs-podcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.