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Biography

Professional biography

Professional Biography 

I am a Lecturer in Management at the Department of People and Organisations (DPO), Faculty of Business and Law, where I am currently working on the Apprenticeships programme. I have twenty years experience in teaching and learning roles at the Open University and University of Greater Manchester and have taught on a wide variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in business and politics via face to face, hybrid and online platform methods, with domestic and international students and via partnerships. I hold a Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), am an external examiner at the University of Staffordshire and have also advised as a subject specialist for QAA quality reviews in business and management education. 

My PhD is in Political Economy from the University of Manchester Alliance Business School and I have an MBA from the Open University Business School alongside an undergraduate degree in History from the University of Birmingham. 

Prior to working in higher education I worked in the corporate sector in a vaiety of roles as manager, project manager and trainer in telecoms and FMCG environments.

Research interests

 My research interests are in a) public and organisational storytelling and mythmaking, reputation management and presentation of public narratives via mediation and mediatisation, b) digital enclosure and associated identity work undertaken by those inhabiting digital workplaces, c) development of work-based learning initiatives in higher education and impact from policy shaping on educational trajectories. 

Teaching interests

I have a broad range of teaching and learning interests and have substantial experience facilitating students from Higher Education Access modules right through to MBA dissertation supervision, where I have a particular interest in the translation of political policies to workplace outcomes. I am working with two current PhD students on work-based learning topics. 

Impact and engagement

You can access my most recent invited lecture for University of Lancaster Educational Research department via YouTube at Fran Myers & Hilary Collins: "Uberising’ HE? Teaching identity work behind the digital curtain" - YouTube (22 March 2021) I've also been an invited speaker at Liverpool Hope University education department, and at the University of Sharjah. I am a reviewer for Journal of Further and Higher Education, and you can find my conference papers on the publications link. 

 

Publications

Book Chapter

Public Myth and Metaphor: Negative Narratives, Lost Reputations and Bankers’ Leadership Illegitimacies from The Media During the Financial Crisis of 2008-9 (2021)

Engaging large groups of individual learners through an online environment – an emerging i-Learner generation? (2013)

Digital Artefact

…You wouldn’t start from here: pandemic and post-pandemic teaching in higher education [Blogpost] (2024)

What happens when apprentices are made redundant (2023)

Journal Article

Navigating from industry to higher education: Practitioner transitions to academic life (2025)

‘Lost futures’, and undermined pasts of the pandemic; digital lecturers’ ghostly reflections of time, self, and the university (2025)

A moment in and out of time: precarity, liminality, and autonomy in crisis teaching (2024)

Book review: Wilfredo Alvarez Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor (2023)

Political Purpose and the Development of Mediatisation: Considering Media Representations and News Management During the Coal Dispute of 1984-5 (2023)

Behind the digital curtain: a study of academic identities, liminalities and labour market adaptations for the ‘Uber-isation’ of HE (2022)

Learner interrupted: understanding the stories behind the codes – a qualitative analysis of HE distance-learner withdrawals (2021)

The Automation Game: technological retention activities and perceptions on changes to tutors’ roles and identity (2019)

[Book Review] Social Myths and Collective Imaginaries (2018)

Signals from the silent: online predictors of non-success (2014)

Other

Learning to work whilst working to learn: Is the degree apprenticeship a route for me? (2024)

Business and Management Degree Apprenticeships – a quiet revolution, a work-in-progress, or business-as-usual? (2023)

Presentation / Conference

Post pandemic questions for putting teachers back at the heart of teaching in higher education (2025)

Tension, emotion and altruism: line managers as unsung heroes at the workforce development coalface? (2024)

Apprentice Perspectives: Agency, resilience, and withdrawal in work-based learning provision (2024)

Imaging the pandemic: Higher Education tutors’ narratives and photographs of precarious online living and learning (2023)

The straw that broke the camel's back?: a tensions based perspective on the role of Portfolios in aiding and restricting learning on the CMDA (2023)

Stop all the clocks: Narratives of independence, interdependence, and resistance in digital teaching when the everyday is every day (2023)

Tracking The Authorised Version? Comparing UK Media Representations and Political News Management During the 1984-5 Coal Dispute (2023)

Teaching in the time of COVID-19: a timescape of online tutors’ lived experiences (2022)

Living in an (im)material world?: higher education enclosure and digital dispossession (2020)

Winter is coming? Academic identity transitions for a digitized and precarious landscape. (2019)

“Frozen Moments” in the Digitisation of Higher Education Teaching - Self Photography as a Critical Ethnographic Approach to Evaluate Academic Identities in a Cross Cultural Setting (2018)

Academic Identities And The Digital Self? A Cross Cultural Study Of Digitisation In Higher Education Teaching. (2018)

Listening and Learning? Privileging the Student Voice in E-Learning Discourses Of Withdrawal: a Qualitative Analysis (2018)

How the Left was won? Media re-positioning of the 'moderate' during the 1984-5 Miners Strike (2018)

The Automation Game: perceptions on the impact of the changes on business school tutors’ roles and identity during the introduction of technological student retention activities: an ‘unbundled’ HE. (2017)

Rhetoric of the digitized faculty – a cross cultural ethnographic study of higher education lecturers at the cross-roads of pedagogic change (2017)

Fantastic Beasts? Media functions for the depersonification and animalisation of ‘guilty men’ during the Financial Crisis, 2008-9 (2016)

Villains, victims, vampires and vitriol: media functions of metaphor for key banking figures during the financial crisis (2016)

Automation in distance learning: an empirical study of unlearning and academic identity change linked to automation of student messaging within distance learning (2016)

Is there a connection between academic identity, un-learning organisational routines and the success of automated student messaging? (2015)

Depoliticisation, discourse and demonization: How did the state try to resist respective crises and competing interests in 1984-5 during the Miners’ strike and the financial crisis of 2008, and what was the contribution of the media to this (2015)

Lost in (social) space? - Testing the transition to learning online (2013)

Innovative technology and improving student retention & success in an online environment (2012)

Embedding employability in distance learning education (2011)