Personal statement

Yvette Taylor is a Professor of Education and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, working with the Scottish Government researching LGBTQ+ lives in the pandemic, on inclusive volunteering with Make Your Mark, and with Scottish Ballet on Safe to be Me, exploring inclusive curriculum in schools.

Yvette has researched queer-class formations across a long-term,  authoring numerous books on queer life and class inequality, recently including Working-Class Queers: Time, Place and Politics (Pluto, 2023). Her RSE Personal Research fellowship on Queer futures: Alternative Models for Social Justice, initiated a Queer and the Cost of Living Crisis Seminar Series focussing on questions of class, community and care in, through and beyond crises time. As part of a Series of Queer Social Justice Pop-Ups, Yvette works with artists, designers and practitioners including at Pride events.

Reviews of Working-Class Queers:

‘A much needed and timely deep forensic dive into the underrepresentation of working class queers within our queer structures and concepts’- Juno Roche, writer

‘This work holds rich and deep insights into lived experience, the power lines of learning within institutions, how people act on and transform each other in community. Yvette’s book opens doors and transforms fault lines. It will be beneficial to thinkers, feelers and doers for years to come.’- Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York

You can download the resource pack for reading Working-Class Queers, here:

Playing Cards for Working-Class Queers: Reading Resources

Yvette also researches higher education, reflected in funded projects such as LGBTQ+ Carers in Universities, Queer Estranged Students, and Redistributing Resources in the Queer International Academy, and in edited collections such as Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education; The Handbook of Imposter Syndrome; and the beautifully illustrated open access collection Feminism in Our Times: Crises, Connections and Cares. Yvette’s work with artists is reflected in open access zines, and in the ESRC funded project Exhibiting Queer Social Justice. The forthcoming collection Queer in a Wee Place: Small Nations, Sexuality and Scotland (Bloomsbury, 2026) will be open access and interdisciplinary, with contributions from inside and outside of academia.

Other funded projects include ESRC funded Fitting Into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities (Routledge, 2012) exploring shifting geographies and temporalities that re-constitute 'city publics' - and the place of the 'public sociologist'.  The Nuffield funded project Challenging justice inequalities with children in conflict with the law explores how intersecting inequalities affect children’s experiences of the Scottish justice system.   The EU-Norface project Comparing Intersectional Life Course Inequalities amongst LGBTQ+ People in Four European Countries offers valuable cross-country insight.

Yvette has held international visiting positions including e.g. at Rutgers University (Fulbright award), ANU, Concordia and SciencePo. Yvette is very happy to supervise PhD students and recent projects include e.g. gender neutral parenting, mixed-reading groups, queer disabled students, hijra experience, LGBTQ+ student experience, working-class students, care-experienced students, estranged students, trans suicide, gender and schooling, menstruation, etc. Students regularly take part in the annual Feminist Research Methods workshops funded by the SGSSS Spring Into Methods programme. 

Yvette has acted in senior management and leadership capacities, including as Head of the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, LSBU (2011-2015), as Research Director (2017-2019) and Deputy Head (2019-2020) at Strathclyde, undertaking strategic initiatives and REF submissions.