Personal statement

Yvette Taylor acted as School of Education Research Director (2017-2019) and Deputy Head of School (2019). She was previously Professor in Social & Policy Studies and Head of the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research (2011-2015) and Senior Lecturer (Sociology), Newcastle University (2005-2011). Yvette was nominated for the THES Outstanding Leadership and Management Team (2013),  as Diversity Role Model (2013), for a Strathclyde Medal (2017) and a HaSS Teaching Excellence Award (2020).  She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Scottish Parliament Academic Fellow (2020-21). 

Yvette was Visiting Professor, Centre for Feminist Research, York University (2020), and at the Australian National University (2018). She has received several international fellowships including the Lillian Robinson Fellowship, Concordia University (2009) and a Fulbright Scholarship, Rutgers University (2010-2011). She has obtained a wide variety of funding, including an EU Norface (£1.4m) 3 year project 'Comparing Intersectional Life Course Inequalities amongst LGBTQI+ Citizens in Four European Counties'. Other projects include ESRC funded  ‘From the Coal Face to the Car Park? Gender and Class in the North East of England’ (2007-2009), ‘Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth’ (2011-2013) and British Academy mid-career fellowship ‘Critical Terrain: Dividing Lines and Lives’ (2013-2014). 

Yvette mentors a variety of early career researchers, and acts as named mentor on fellowships including ESRC postdocts, Marie Curie,  Leverhulme, and Fulbright Distinguished Teacher schemes. She is currently mentor to Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) funded postdoc on 'International Trans and Intersex Activist Relationships: Ethics, Ethnodrama and Representation'. 

Yvette has published four sole-authored books based on funded research: Working-class Lesbian Life (2007); Lesbian and Gay Parenting (2009); Fitting Into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities (2012) and Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth (2015), and has co-authored Feminist Repetitions in Higher Education: Interrupting Career Categories (2020). 

Edited titles include Educational Diversity (2012); The Entrepreneurial University (2014); Mapping Intimacies (2013); Queering Religion, Religious Queers (2014); Feeling Academic in the NeoLiberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures (2018).  Yvette edits the Palgrave Gender and Education Series and co-edits the Routledge Advances in Critical Diversities Series and is on the Editorial Boards of Gender and Education, Social and Cultural Geography, Sexualities (Sociology 2011-2016). She is External Examiner (Sociology), University of Surrey (2016- ). 

Yvette teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the School of Education and in Humanities and Social Science, including the BA in Primary Education, and the MSc Applied Gender Studies. She set up the inaugral Strathclyde Feminist Research Network Seminar Series in 2016, and has co-organized this with colleagues ever since. 

Yvette supervises across areas of gender, sexuality, class, educational inequality, religion - and currently supervises the following PhDs, including ESRC and Research Excellence funded:

Getting Real: Contemporary Struggles for Transgender Legitimacy

Theybys: Gender Nonconforming Parenting

Student Estrangement in Higher Education 

Social class and the 'Bottom Reading Group' in Primary Education 

Gender Performance in Rural Secondary School

Understandings of Immigrant Students in Italian Education: Practices, Policies & Pedagogies

Hijra Community in India

Gender in the field of Construction

Queer Teachers

Teenage Understanding and Negotiations of Sexual Consent