Dr Kirsty Finn
- Senior Lecturer (Culture, Literacies, Inclusion & Pedagogy)
telephone: 01413301844
email: Kirsty.Finn@glasgow.ac.uk
Biography
Career
I am a Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Education, specialising in the field of Higher Education research. I joined the University of Glasgow in December 2018; however, before this I worked as a lecturer at Lancaster University (2015-2018), Edge Hill University (2013-2015), and Teesside University (2009-2013). I have worked both in Sociology and Social Science departments, and research centres and Schools of Education. My teaching is often in fields related to educational theory, youth and transitions studies, and the sociology of policy and educational inequalities. Equally, my research is interdisciplinary, operating at the intersection of sociology, geography and education.
My qualifications include a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester (2010), an MA in Social Research Methods from the University of Leeds (2004) and a BA in Sociology from the University of Newcastle (UK) (2003).
Research interests
My research focuses on the everyday practices, personal relationships and mobilities of students and graduates in higher education. My work considers how feelings of belonging, enactments of various modes of citizenship, and personal wellbeing are negotiated in and through student mobilities at various scales and within diverse spaces. I work at the intersection of sociology and geography, foregrounding space and place-making for students in higher education, and placing their experiences as students in the broader context of their identities and attachments as people in the world. My work examines relational decision-making and the role of personal relationships in making sense of education and work-based identities. I am particularly interested in the ways higher education policy, and popular representations of students, shapes what we come to recognise as distinctly student identities and values and how this creates both a hierarchy of experience and a partial view of an increasingly diverse cohort of uiversity entrants and graduates.
Finally, I am interested in methodologically innovative research, particularly techniques that illuminate the different temporalities of student experiences, identities and modes of belonging (i.e. qualitative longitudinal research), the mobilities that underpin transitions and experiences (i.e. go along methods, mapping, walking interviews) and participatory visual methods. My work has a strong focus on the interrelated experiences of social class and gender and I draw on theoretical frameworks which foreground reflexivity and the relational and emotional dimensions of inequality, identity and belonging. Further interests include graduate trajectories and employability including university-to-work transitions; intergenerational issues as they relate to education and work; friendships in education; student citizenship and representational issues; and student housing.
I am author of two books: Personal Life, Young Women and Higher Education: A relational Approach to Student and Graduate Experiences (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and Everyday Mobile Belonging: Theorising Higher Education Student Mobilities (Bloomsbury, 2019 (with Mark Holton)). I also have a number of articles in high quality peer-reviewed journals in the sociology of (higher) education.
Supervision
PhD Doctorates Completed
Shin Pyng Wong 'Correspondence or Discrepancy? A Multi-method Examination of Internationalisation Agendas in Malaysian Private Higher Education'
Teaching
For the academic year 2018-9 I provide teaching on the following:
- Modern Educational Thought (Core Masters level module)
- MEduc Education and Society 3 (Undergraduate level module)
- EdD Ethics and Education (Doctorate in Education)
