Spotlight on research: digitally accessible content

Spotlight on research: Making it to the registers

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Priyasha: We are interested in trying to understand how healthcare professionals who are trained overseas experience their move to the UK. What happens to the knowledge, the skills, and the expertise that they carry with them?

Our project considers registration, which is the mechanism through which the law recognises qualifications and expertise. Professional registration enables healthcare workers to join the workforce, but often it's a struggle for healthcare professionals who are trained overseas to be able to get onto the register in the UK.

Amrita: Our research encompasses both historical and contemporary elements. We draw on a range of archives from the 1930s to the recent past for a historical understanding. And to understand contemporary experiences, we are conducting interviews with doctors and nurses who aim to, or have joined, the professional registers.

We are collaborating with Professor Nasreen Ali and Ms Rukia Saleem from the University of Bedfordshire, and organisations that support internationally trained doctors and nurses.

As we hope to change mentalities and inform policymaking, we also aim to engage with the public by working with Stage@leeds, a youth theatre group.

Marie-Andrée: Our research has highlighted the tension in how we value internationally trained healthcare professionals who support the NHS.

It's undeniable that migrant and refugee healthcare workers have been a great resource to tap into in times of need, such as wars and pandemics. However, our duty of hospitality and welcome towards migrants should not be conditional on workforce needs.

The human need to preserve one’s identity when in transit is universal, and so professional identities have to be respected for their own sake, not only for their instrumental value.

Spotlight on research: Democratising international law

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Amaka: I work in the area of intellectual property law. My research tackles the historical and contemporary impact of IP laws in our everyday lives. So be it the impact of patents on access to medicines as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, or the way global corporations have hijacked IP laws to the detriment of populations at large, especially those located in the global south.

On one of my research projects, titled 'Democratising International Law’, I'm working with a team of scholars from Canada, Colombia, Brazil, and Ireland. And with successful grants, we were able to organise the first TWAIL Summer Academy, July 2023, that focuses heavily on the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).

During the Summer Academy, we were able to bring together doctoral students, early career researchers, as well as indigenous activists and judges from the Colombian justice system. We discussed four main priority areas for Colombia, including economic injustice, mass displacement, environmental injustice, and human rights issues.

In addition, fundings from the UK Research and Innovation Council (Research England) were used to translate key TWAIL texts from English to Spanish, which was used during the Summer Academy. The Summer Academy focused on the experiences of racialised global south people, bringing together diverse voices. The Summer Academy encouraged interdisciplinary research and innovations and discussions on global issues as pertains to Colombia.

Finally, the TWAIL texts, which were translated from English to Spanish and published on the TWAIL Review platform, open access, opened up the conversation on people who previously wouldn't have access to this text, as a result of language barriers. It's brought in different and diverse voices to challenge Eurocentric rules and norms of international law.

Spotlight on research: Tackling rural domestic abuse

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Sam: My research focuses on men's violence against women. Most recently, I've been looking at domestic abuse in rural areas.

Most research on crime and criminal justice is focused on urban areas, so my recent research has been looking at rural domestic abuse in close collaboration with Cumbria Constabulary.

We analysed 8,901 intimate partner abuse crimes that were reported to Cumbria Constabulary over a 30 month period. That included over 5,300 unique offenders and over 5,300 unique victims.

We also conducted interviews with over 40 practitioners, so that was frontline police response officers and domestic abuse service providers.

So Cumbria has a resident population of about half a million people, but there are small pockets of urban areas where people tend to live, so 53% of the population is spread across the rest of this very rural county.

During our research, the problems caused by rural living were a persistent theme. So the persistence of traditional gender roles in rural and farming communities can actually make it harder for victims to speak out and seek support.

We know that perpetrators commonly isolate their victims from support networks, and rural isolation may exacerbate that, so not just the geographical terrain, it's also the lack of transport networks, local infrastructures, and also lack of internet connectivity, broadband, even a mobile phone signal. The presence of guns, chemicals, and farming machinery in farming communities were viewed as a particular risk.

We recommended the development of local, multi-agency responses in collaboration with specific specialist organisations like Age UK and the National Farmers Union to reach those hard to reach communities.

We also recommended specialist training for police officers – like that provided by Women's Aid – to ensure that practitioners can recognise nonviolent forms of domestic abuse.

Spotlight on research: A focus on reverse mentoring

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Rachael: My research seeks to explore hierarchies and power dynamics that exist naturally and traditionally within different organisations and communities. It seeks to build bridges across divides that are often experienced between people at the more senior and perhaps more junior end of organisations and institutions.

At its heart, it's about empowering people from underrepresented backgrounds to recognise the value of their voices, and the power that they have to contribute towards meaningful change within their organisation and community.

In particular, it's centred around the concept of reverse mentoring. Reverse mentoring is all about taking the traditional mentoring roles and flipping that on its head. So often a more junior person, perceived perhaps as less experienced, becomes a mentor to someone who is in a more senior, expert or influential position within an organisation.

Some examples of my work have been working with senior leaders in big law firms who have been mentored on equity, diversity, and inclusion issues by junior and aspiring lawyers within their organisation from different underrepresented communities.

My research has most significantly impacted the hundreds of staff and students at the University of Leeds, and also with our external partners who've taken part in the reverse mentoring schemes. And I'm regularly delivering workshops and seminars on this topic in order to try and encourage others to engage more meaningfully with it as a concept, thinking about how they can really make the most out of an effective reverse mentoring scheme.

I've also collaborated with and advised a number of external organisations, including other universities, law firms, public sector departments and councils in order to support them on their own reverse mentoring missions.