My research sits within critical, feminist post-structural, and reconceptualist traditions and offers a sustained analysis of how neoliberal governance, marketisation, and choice policy reorganise early childhood education and teacher education. I examine how policy logics are translated into everyday educational practices, shaping curriculum, pedagogy, professional identities, and families’ experiences through discourse, affect, and power.

My research program brings together two core commitments: my long-standing experience as an educator (including language teaching) and my training as a sociologist of education. This positioning informs three interconnected lines of inquiry. First, I examine early childhood curriculum and pedagogy, with particular interest in democratic, emergent, culturally responsive, and relational approaches, and in how cultural models of education intersect with policy frameworks in early childhood education and care. Second, I investigate teacher education, focusing on how theory, research, and practice are connected in Initial Teacher Education, and how collaborative and relational models may challenge technocratic and market-driven approaches to professional formation. Third, my work explores teacher identity and agency, analysing how educators’ professional subjectivities are produced and constrained within contemporary policy environments.

Across these strands, I have developed particular expertise in affect theory, theorising affect as a socio-relational force entangled with discourse, governance, and inequality in education. While my current research is firmly located in early childhood education, my background in language teaching continues to inform my attention to communication, meaning-making, inclusion, and the politics of language in educational contexts.