蜜桃传媒

Research on how best to serve the needs of a particular community is often criticised for not involving the community impacted, both in defining the problems faced and designing the solutions. At Brunel, we work directly with young people in making changes that help them live better lives.

The Youth Action Group is being set up by researchers at Brunel University to identify barriers faced by young people locally and help us design solutions. The first phase of this project is interviews conducted with young people in the local area to find out what challenges they face and how they could be best supported. We will also be collecting data using online surveys.

Once we have reviewed all the responses to the interviews and surveys, we will put together an action group of young people. They will work with us in developing a plan of action to directly impact the areas that are highlighted as important by these interviews.

The Youth Action Group of change makers will directly impact our research and will help provide solutions to improving the lives of young people.

Our research is aimed at young people between the ages of 18 and 25 who live in the Uxbridge area. Our research model and findings can be scaled up and applied further afield.

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Professor Meredith Jones - Professor Jones is Director of the pan-university Institute for Communities and Society.  Meredith is a transdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersections of feminist theories of the body with media, gender, and cultural studies. She is particularly interested in popular culture, visuality, and embodiment, and has published widely in these areas. Her latest edited volume, Performing the Penis: Phalluses in 21st Century Cultures (with Evelyn Callahan) comprehensively introduces the emerging discipline of Penis Studies. She is currently working on a monograph about vulvas and on a yearbook about genital transformations in media and culture.  Beautyscapes: Mapping Cosmetic Surgery Tourism (written with Ruth Holliday and David Bell) won the 2020 Foundation for Sociology of Health and Illness Prize. This book is based on extensive fieldwork carried out in Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Tunisia, Spain, and Czech Republic. It also comprises digital research into cosmetic surgery websites and cosmetic surgery communities on social media.  Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery, Meredith's first monograph, is a widely-cited foundational text in studies of makeover culture, cosmetic surgery and feminist theories of the body. Her other books include a major collection of feminist writing about cosmetic surgery that she co-edited with philosopher Cressida Heyes, Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer.  She often speaks publicly about social media, popular culture and feminism, and is an expert on the socio-cultural aspects of the Kardashians. She hosted a scholarly Kimposium! in 2015 and Kimposium! The Sequel was held in September 2021. Meredith is active in the creative industries and founded the Trunk series of books with artist and designer Suzanne Boccalatte, which includes curated collections of artworks and essays about Hair and Blood. Currently she is collaborating with Taylor & Francis Group to deliver a series of projects around new and innovative modes of publishing. The goal is to develop more digitally relevant, flexible, inclusive and faster ways of publishing for academics as well as community, industry, and NGO groups. Qualifications PhD in Cultural Studies, University of Western Sydney, 2006 BA Hons. in Women's Studies, 1st Class, University of Sydney, 1998

Professor Christina Victor - Christina joined Brunel in October 2009. She is  Professor of Gerontology and Public Health  in the College of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences and Associate PVC-Research Culture and Governance. She is also Director of the  Institute of Health, Medicine and Environments. Christina started her academic career as a geographer with a particular interest in the spatial distribution of health and illness and access to, and provision of, health and social care. She has a BA in Geography from Swansea University and an M Phil in medical geography from Nottingham.  It was whilst working at the Medical School in Cardiff that she developed  her interests in gerontology and her PhD investigated outcome after discharge for older people in Wales and she now focuses her interests in public health/population medicine on to the experiences of old age and later life. She has a special interest in researching loneliness and isolation. Christina’s initial research interests were focussed upon  health and health inequalities and the evaluation of services for older people.   More recently she developed a keen interest in loneliness and isolation; the benefits of exercise and activity in later life and the experiences of old age and later life amongst minority communities and the experience of ageing for people with intellectual disabilities. She has received funding for her research from a range of funders including ESRC, NIHR, Dunhill Medical Trust, Leverhulme and the British Academy. Christina has written over  400 peer reviewed articles and published  8 books in the field of gerontology. She is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health and an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.  In 2017 Christina was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award of the British Society of Gerontology and awarded Fellowship of the Gerontological Society of America. Her work has been cited 23,000 times and her H idex is 78. She has 3 articles in the list of the 100 most cited articles in the field of loneliness and is ranked as one of the top 100 social science and humanities researchers in the UK.  Qualifications: PhD, M Phil, BA

Project last modified 12/10/2023