Professor Yvette Taylor
Strathclyde Institute of Education
Personal statement
Yvette Taylor is Professor of Education and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and held 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) at the University of Strathclyde, leading strategic initiatives and REF submissions. She is currently Research Director and Co-Director of Postgraduate Research (2025- ).
Yvette’s research centres on queer life, class inequality, education, and social justice, 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. The forthcoming Queer in a Wee Place: Small Nations, Sexuality and Scotland (Bloomsbury, 2026) will be open access and interdisciplinary.
Funded research includes 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 regularly organises the SGSSS Spring into Methods Feminist Research Methods workshops.
Prize And Awards
Publications
- Queer in a Wee Place : Small Nations, Sexuality & Scotland
- Taylor Yvette
- (2026)
- https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350513068
- Working-Class Queers, Re-Imagined : An Artistic Anthology
- Duncan AJ, Jardine Rachel, Leisk Madeleine, Purwin Candice, Taylor Yvette
- (2026)
- Academic Careers and Gender
- Breeze Maddie, Taylor Yvette
- The Sage Encyclopedia of Education and Gender (2025) (2025)
- https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071926697.n7
- Not on the reading list : locating queer working-class knowledge
- Taylor Yvette
- (2025)
- "It's your word against mine" : a case study of gender negotiation in a Spanish school
- Pereira-Garcia Sofia, Devís-Devís José, Villescas Vivancos Fulgencio, Taylor Yvette
- Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal Vol 42, pp. 261-274 (2025)
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-023-00954-9
- COVID-19 : Queer Communities
- Taylor Yvette
- Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies (2025) (2025)
Professional Activities
- Queer in A Wee Place: Small Nations, Sexuality and Scotland. LGBTQ+ History Month,
- Organiser
- 2026
- Queer in a Wee Place: Small Nations, Sexuality and Scotland
- Organiser
- 2026
- Kate Murphy
- Host
- 2026
- Working-Class Queers, Re-Imagined: An Artistic Anthology
- Organiser
- 2026
- Looking Back, Looking Forward: LGBTQ+ Equalities
- Contributor
- 2025
- Spring Into Methods SGSSS-SGSAH Workshop: Feminist Research Methods
- Organiser
- 2025
Projects
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Feminist Research Methods Across Universities: Research practice, process & power relations
- Breeze, Maddie (Principal Investigator) Taylor, Yvette (Co-investigator) Govinda, Radhika (Co-investigator) Mackay, Jennifer (Co-investigator)
- In-depth SGSSS-SGSAH funded workshop building on previous Spring into Methods events, expanding successful collaborations across the Universities of Edinburgh, Queen Margaret, Stirling, and Strathclyde. Mobilizing interdisciplinary networks – theGender Research Group (Stirling), Feminist Research Network (Strathclyde), GENDER.ED (UoE) - ensures the workshop appeals to a full range of Arts & Humanities and Social Science postgraduate researchers. In response to feedback we have enhanced representation of a range of universities, and aim to include participants from diverse Scottish HEIs.
- 25-Jan-2024 - 27-Jan-2024
Contact
Professor
Yvette
Taylor
Strathclyde Institute of Education
Email: yvette.taylor@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 444 8048