Dr Ellen Pilsworth
Associate Professor and Project Lead (UKRI Future Leader’s Fellow)
‘Refugee policy is an increasingly critical global issue. Our work will provide independent research insight, informed by public engagement with the topic, to help audiences understand and reimagine Britain’s relationship with refugees.
We need to develop new ways of talking about immigration and asylum that take past and present realities into account. I hope that our research can serve to re-orient public understanding and discussion about this complex issue.
As the principal investigator (PI) on the Nation of Refuge project, I’m excited to work with such an impressive interdisciplinary team. We’re taking an innovative approach, combining our literary, historical and linguistic specialisms and combining a range of research methods, including oral histories, archives, literary analysis, co-creation with communities, and curating a museum exhibition with Reading Museum. Public engagement is a core part of the project, and I’m delighted to be working with inspiring community partners.’
Ellen has oversight of the project as a whole and co-leads on research strand 3: 2000 – present day
Ellen leads on strand 3 of the research alongside Anenechukwu. Where Anenechukwu focuses on how today’s refugees tell their own stories, Ellen looks at how refugees have been imagined by British people who do not identify as refugees.
I’m excited for the opportunity to contribute:
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an inclusive leadership approach, bringing the team together and facilitating a working culture where everyone belongs, can contribute their expertise and enjoy development opportunities. It’s my pleasure to be able to support all my team in developing their research and professional careers throughout this project.
- Networking experience, facilitating connections between the project team and our collaborators within and outside of the university.
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Research expertise in literary and discourse analysis, archival research methods, and cultural studies approaches.
- Specialist knowledge of British public dialogue about Nazism and its victims during the 1930s and 40s. Importantly, I learned that people never view any topic in a vacuum.
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I believe it’s through understanding the past that we can comprehend the present and begin to imagine the future. I’m therefore particularly interested in how the British public’s understanding and perceptions of asylum in Britain have been affected by (a) how the social and cultural context has changed from 1930 to the present, and (b) how changing communication technologies have affected social discourse.