Professor Yvette Taylor

Strathclyde Institute of Education

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Personal statement

Yvette Taylor is Professor of Education and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, holding senior leadership roles including Head of the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research at LSBU (2011–15), Research Director (2017–19) and Deputy Head (2019–20). She is currently Research Director and Co-Director of Postgraduate Research (2025- ).

Yvette’s research centres on class inequality, education, social justice, and queer life, working closely with policymakers, artists, and community organisations. Collaborations include projects with the Scottish Government on LGBTQ+ lives during the pandemic, Make Your Mark on inclusive volunteering, and Scottish Ballet’s Safe to be Me, exploring inclusive school curricula.

Yvette is the author of multiple books on queer-class formations, most recently Working-Class Queers: Time, Place and Politics (Pluto, 2023) widely recognised for its intervention into class inequality within queer studies. Her RSE Personal Research Fellowship, Queer Futures: Alternative Models for Social Justice, launched the Queer and the Cost of Living Crisis seminar series and a programme of Queer Social Justice Pop-Ups, including work at Pride events with artists and designers.

Yvette’s higher education research includes funded projects on LGBTQ+ carers in universities, estranged and care-experienced students, queer precarity, and redistributing resources in the Queer International Academy. She has edited major collections including Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education, The Handbook of Imposter Syndrome, and the open-access Feminism in Our Times: Crises, Connections and Cares. Her arts-based work appears in open-access zines and the ESRC-funded Exhibiting Queer Social Justice project. Queer in a Wee Place: Small Nations, Sexuality and Scotland (Bloomsbury, 2026) is open access and interdisciplinary.

Funded research include ESRC and Nuffield projects on class, gender, justice inequalities, and the EU-Norface project on LGBTQ+ life-course experiences across Europe. Yvette has held international visiting positions at Rutgers (Fulbright), ANU, Concordia, and Sciences Po etc..

She welcomes PhD supervision across a wide range of topics including e.g. queer and trans studies, class and education, disability, gender and schooling, and queer-feminist methods. Yvette organises the annual SGSSS Spring into Methods Feminist Research Methods workshops.

 

 

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Professional Activities

Queer in a Wee Place: Small Nations, Sexuality and Scotland
Speaker
3/4/2026
School Attendance Engagement Event
Organiser
23/3/2026
Queer in a Wee Place: Small Nations, Sexuality and Scotland
Organiser
2026
Queer in a Wee Place – LGBTQ Lives and the 2026 Scottish Election
Contributor
2026
Working-Class Queers, Re-Imagined: An Artistic Anthology
Organiser
2026
Kate Murphy
Host
2026

More professional activities

Projects

Feminist Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Inequality, Community and Creative Practice
Taylor, Yvette (Principal Investigator) Charlton, Kayleigh (Co-investigator) Hardley, Stephanie (Co-investigator) House, Melody (Co-investigator) Marta, Samara (Co-investigator) Mevawalla, Zinnia (Co-investigator) Zhang, Siqi (Co-investigator)
This SHSSS-SGSAH funded two-day workshop - Feminist Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Inequality, Community and Creative Practice - returns the Spring Into Methods offering to the University of Strathclyde, where the original Feminist Research Methods initiative was first developed in 2016 (funded from 2017). We retain our commitment to widening participation, supporting students and staff across the career course, and from institutions that have historically been under-represented.
Building on this legacy, the workshop extends Strathclyde’s commitment to inclusive, interdisciplinary and publicly-engaged scholarship, while drawing on a rich ecosystem of collaboration with external partners such as Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL). The 2026 iteration will focus on methodological approaches that speak directly to key SGSS themes (social inequalities, inclusive culture, heritage and creative practice) centring interdisciplinary as an aim, objective and learning outcome.
13-Jan-2026 - 14-Jan-2026
Absent Opportunity? How Protected Characteristics Shape School Attendance in Scotland and England (£3955)
Klein, Markus (Principal Investigator) Taylor, Yvette (Co-investigator) Robinson, Carol (Co-investigator) Marta, Samara (Researcher)
01-Jan-2026 - 30-Jan-2026
Athena’s Threshold: An EDI Doorway to Participation and Change
Taylor, Yvette (Principal Investigator) Oliver, Joshua (Co-investigator)
This project explores how an artistic intervention located on the Strathclyde campus can act as a catalyst for meaningful engagement with EDI questions. The project pilots the ‘civic arts cycle’ in a university setting, using a campus-specific EDI prompt derived from Athena Swan themes. A visual/interactive installation - an ‘EDI Door’ as re-imagined Athena motif - interrupts routine campus space and invites students, staff and equalities groups to collectively produce insights that move beyond compliance towards lived-experience-driven institutional learning
01-Jan-2026 - 31-Jan-2026
Redistributing Resources in the International Queer Academy
Taylor, Yvette (Principal Investigator) Brim, Matt (Principal Investigator) McKinlay, Jack (Post Grad Student)
Redistributing Resources in the International Queer Academy consolidates previous work, reckoning with class inequality via the discipline of ‘queer theory’, as central to Gender Studies, Social Science and Humanities disciplines. It imagines the creation of cross-class, cross-institutional relationships that provide the connective tissue for more varied queer-class scholarly and pedagogical possibilities. This can only be done if we have a much more thorough understanding of the material realities of poor and working-class queer education and the knowledge that ‘underclass academic’ communities create.
28-Jan-2025 - 31-Jan-2025
Queer Social Justice as Academic Practice
Taylor, Yvette (Principal Investigator)
Queer Social Justice as Academic Practice is a participatory interdisciplinary workshop providing provocations in ongoing research issues and urgencies. Situated within queer and feminist research methods, offering inspiration, critical reflection and practical sessions it thinks about what research matters, and why? Is our mattering measured in or beyond citation, or what other measures of ‘use’ might we imagine as we reconstruct our mattering?
03-Jan-2024 - 30-Jan-2025
Queer Highlands and Islands: (Re)Placing Queer Publics
Taylor, Yvette (Principal Investigator) Reggiani, Marco (Principal Investigator)
This project addresses ‘the scarcity of quality data regarding rural communities’ (RSE, 2023), focusing on the possibilities of LGBTQ+ lives, people and places as offering a ‘queer-ing’ of normative knowledges, locations and centres.

£ 3,000 HaSS Strategic Project
01-Jan-2024 - 01-Jan-2024

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Contact

Professor Yvette Taylor
Strathclyde Institute of Education

Email: yvette.taylor@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 444 8048