• Research Fellow (School of Geographical and Earth Sciences)

telephone: 01413308655
email: Olivia.Stevenson@glasgow.ac.uk

Current research projects/activities:

I am the Research Fellow working on the project – Geographies of missing people: experiences, processes, responses – which is funded by the ESRC for 3-years. Alongside Hester Parr (PI Glasgow) and Co-Investigators Nick Fyfe (Dundee University) and Penny Woolnough (Grampian Police) we will be collecting qualitative evidence about missing 'journeys' from returned missing people themselves, and working to understand how and where different actors decide how to search for those who are missing; we will do this by interviewing police search advisors across the UK and families of missing persons. We are working with Grampian and MPS (London) police forces and the charity Missing People. The project will have academic, operational and policy impacts, both nationally and abroad. http://www.geographiesofmissingpeople.org.uk

Personal biography:

I was awarded a BSc. (Human Geography) from Brunel University in 1999. I went on to complete a fully funded M.A. (Human Geography Research) from the University of Sheffield, before going to undertake an ESRC-funded Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Leeds with Professor Gill Valentine (awarded 2008). My doctoral research examined children and their families’ use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) within key spaces: the home, the school and the street. Through this I developed an interest in education policy, ICTs, family practices and methodological aspects of carrying out household research, with a particular interest in the ways that family members’ interactions with ICT are shaped by and shape their use of time, domestic relationships, social networking and mobility practices. I then went on to hold a 3-year research post at the University of Stirling (Education, 2008 – 2011) on the ESRC funded project Young Children Learning with Toys and Technology at Home. This study explored preschool children’s (aged 3 to 5) interactions with a range of technologies at home, including technological toys, and the opportunities these provide for learning. It was here that my interest in themes, such as children, families, technology and domestic space continued to develop. I joined the University of Glasgow in 2011, as a Research Fellow on ESRC-funded project Geographies of Missing People: experiences, processes, responses.