Discrimination, Equality, Ethnic Backgrounds, Identity, Prejudice, Race
Professor Saffron Karlsen is a Senior Lecturer in Social Research and a member of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship. Her research is concerned with how people identify and define their own ethnicity, drawing on their family background, community belonging, and experience of life, and the challenges that they face. She has examined ethnic discrimination, ethnic inequalities in health, education and society, social mobility, attitudes towards Female Genital Mutilation, the use of ethnicity data to make policy decisions, and the notion of being British. Most recently Professor Karlsen has been tracking the social impact of the COVID-19 virus on ethnic groups in terms of health provision and equalities of access to support. She is part of an International Network on Female Genital Cutting and a member of the advisory board of a project funded by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare to explore approaches to FGM-safeguarding. She is leading on the creation of a Bristol Race Equality Network, co-partnered with Bristol City Council and Black South West Network. Professor Karlsen also sits on the ONS Inclusive Data Taskforce. Education 1995 - BSc Economic History with Population Studies, London School of Economics 1996 - MSc Medical Demography, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 2006 - PhD Sociology, University College London
Associate professor of art education
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignAutism, Identity, Pop Culture, Psychoanalysis
Laura Hetrick is a professor of art education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
As a late-in-life diagnosed autistic professor, Hetrick is focusing mainly on autistic identity and the autistic lived experience. Currently, she is working with an interdisciplinary team of scientists including a geneticist/cell & developmental biologist and a neuroscientist to explore and understand various autistic co-occurring conditions (formerly known as co-morbidities) from a neurogenetic, molecular and cellular level, and as a result, advocate for improved medical care, prevention, and maintenance for autistic adults.
Using her phenomenological lived experience as the social model of disability context for the medical model of disability findings, Hetrick hopes to address the epistemic injustice that often occurs when researching on autistics, not with autistics. In the near future, at the Beckman Institute, she hopes to research such issues as the mechanisms and processes of autistic adult cognitive development; how an autistic’s activities contribute to resilience through the adult lifespan; the development and evaluation of cost-effective and life-integrated autistic interventions using psychology, neuroscience, kinesiology, education and more; and the mechanisms underlying autistic intervention effects, including those related to behavioral, neural, emotional, motivational, and social processes.
Her doctoral scholarship concerned itself with the emergent identity formation of art student teachers: the knowledge and cultural systems through which art teaching identity conceives itself, and the ontological consequences that evolve from those identifications. Hetrick is the co-editor of the journal Visual Arts Research, a publication providing a forum for historical, critical, cultural, psychological, educational, and conceptual research in visual arts and aesthetic education.
To date, Hetrick has published one edited book, 20 peer-reviewed articles and given over 30 conference presentations and invited lectures. She is consistently invited/accepted to present at conferences, workshops and panels in the U.S., and internationally, including Canada, Finland, Jamaica, Jordan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey.
Currently, she is affiliated with the Autism Self Advocacy Network; Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology; Illinois Center for Social and Behavioral Science; National Art Education Association; the Disability Studies in Art Education Special Interest Group; the Illinois Art Education Association; the United States Society for Education through Art; and the International Society for Education through Art.
Research interests
Education
Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 2010
Cognitive Neuroscience, Conformity, Culture, Culture And Human Development, Identity, nonconformity, Personality, Psychology, Social And Behavioral Sciences
Our work seeks to understand what shapes people's identity. Our research investigates how people think about their identity, changes to their identity, and how identity is different according cultural contexts. We use a personality approach to understanding individual differences in identity. The overarching goal of our research is to illuminate what makes people who they are as dynamic complex individuals living across the world.