Dr Ellen Bishop is a Research Associate at University of Glasgow working on a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship funded project on Civic Imaginary Partnerships, with Dr Michael Howcroft (PI). Civic imaginaries are the ways that people think, feel and dream about the futures of their places. The research project brings together communities, policymakers, researchers and artists from Chester, Frome, Glasgow, Hull and Southampton to ask what being civic means in the United Kingdom right now, and playfully considers how people collectively reimagine and reinvent their places.

Ellen completed her PhD at the University of Leicester in 2022, funded by the ESRC Midlands Graduate School DTP. Her thesis examined the geographies of secondary school students who speak English as an additional language (EAL).

Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, Ellen was a Research Associate on the ESRC funded project ‘The School Meals Service: Past, Present – and Future?’ based at the University of Wolverhampton, working on contemporary ethnographies of school meals in four partner schools. Ellen was also previously an Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University on the BSc Geography and BSc Human Geography courses. Ellen has also previously worked as a Postdoctoral Innovation Associate, where she disseminated her PhD findings to schools through CPD sessions and resources to support EAL students, and as a Research Assistant on a digital literacy project, both at the University of Leicester. 

Ellen is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). 

• Place/ place-making
• Civic imaginaries
• Spatialities
• Children's geographies
• Geographies of education
• Educational inequalities
• English as an additional language
• Food geographies
• Ethnographic methods
• Creative methods

Research groups

• Place & built environment

Ellen supervises Masters student dissertations in Urban Studies and Social Policy