ECR Spotlight: Towards an Ethics of Resistance

Helen Knowler is an Associate Professor in the Arena Centre for Research Based Education at University College London (UCL), leading the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) and engaging in cross-faculty collaboration around how UCL’s eugenics history and resources can be incorporated into different disciplinary contexts and how to teach this ‘difficult knowledge’.

Helen’s teaching expertise and research interests are closely aligned to Inclusive Education. Her interests include the role of educators in developing reparative approaches to teaching in the context of institutional legacies and histories of harm. A former primary school teacher working in the field of SEMH needs, and Advisory Teacher for a Local Authority supporting schools to prevent permanent exclusions from school, Helen has worked in higher education since 2006, including at the universities of Plymouth, Bristol and Exeter.

Dr Elizabeth J Done is a graduate of the London School of Economics, Visiting Fellow at the University of Exeter, and gained her doctorate at the University of Plymouth’s Institute of Education where she is an Associate Professor (Inclusion) and currently leads a postgraduate programme and supervises inclusion-related doctoral research.

Elizabeth has published widely on inclusion-related issues from a poststructuralist perspective and on posthumanist (re)theorising of pedagogic practices. She has co-edited a Palgrave-Springer text, International Perspectives on Exclusionary Pressures in Education, and edited a sequel, Theorising Exclusionary Pressures in Education. Elizabeth’s collaborative research concerns stakeholder perspectives on exclusionary practices in schools. She is a member of the ESRC Peer Review College and reviews for several high-profile international journals.