Dr Esther Muddiman

(she/her)

FHEA PhD

Publication

• Date
• Type
• Promoted

Research

My research interests span sociology, education, civil society and social justice:

• Youth activism and intergenerational justice
• Higher education and civil society
• Family and civic engagement
• Children's Rights
• Critical and decolonial pedagogies
• Creative methods

Across different projects I am interested in exploring how and why some people get involved in collective or ‘publicly minded’ activities – things like volunteering, political campaigning, labour organisation or environmental activism. Young people, in particular, are often identified in the media as leading campaigns for climate action, but what can this tell us about intergenerational relationships and ideas about justice, power and collective responsibility?

Current Projects

Youth Activism Project (YAP) 

I am co-founder of the SOCSI Youth Activism Project with Dr Rhian Barrance and Cardiff co-lead for the GW4 Climate Justice Education Research Network. The YAP  focusses on young people involved with protesting and other forms of campaigning. Our first publication from our research into youth activism from this project, ‘beyond bad behaviour’ explores school protest and proposes a typology of different forms of creative activism. We are currently writing about the relationship between schooling and the fostering of activist identities and practices in Wales, on familial influences on activism, and on embodied and personalised forms of activism. We have shared our analysis at an ESRC Festival of Social Science event, the 2024 BERA national conference and at a symposium on school uniforms. 

Archival Activism 

This archival research focusses on uncovering the history of student civic engagement, activism and protest at Cardiff University through examining archives of the Gair Rhydd student newspaper. I co-supervised  summer internship student Liv Eveleigh in the summer of 2024 with Dr Melissa Mendez and the university Special Collections team to explore key areas of protest and debate in the student newspaper during the 1980s. Liv created a zine based on this research linking to her interest and advocacy in feminist and LGBTQ+ rights.

Alternative Guides, Inclusive futures, and Dude Walls 

Anyone who has visited the School of Social Sciences in Cardiff will likely remember the grand entrance steps of the Glamorgan Building and the oak panelled committee rooms adorned with portraits of men and the gold-painted sea-scape on the ceiling. I have become increasingly interested in the history of the building, its role in the development of Cardiff as a city of power and wealth - thanks to the ‘black gold’ of the South Wales coalfields - and the impact that these traces of money, power and masculine privilege have on people who spend time in the building today.

In summer 2024 I supervised a summer internship student with Dr Agatha Herman for a project exploring staff and student experiences of the building. Poppy’s audio tour – the Alternative Guide to the building - will soon be available (you can read about Poppy’s experiences here).  

We have also been gathering information about key figures implicated in the portraits, with the help of the Glamorgan Archives and university Special Collections teams, as part of the Dude Walls project (launching in 2025). We hope to contribute to discussions about how we can make our learning and working spaces more inclusive and feed into our EDI agenda. Agatha and I also secured HEFCW Research Culture Funding to design and deliver a workshop ‘Driving Inclusive Futures: recontextualising the socio-cultural legacies of Cardiff University’ that enabled us to make cross-disciplinary connections with colleagues interested in decolonial and critical readings of our own institution.  

Complicating Cardiff 

I am part of a wider project with colleagues from across the College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and in collaboration with The Wallich, Tiger Bay and the World and Caer Heritage to explore complicated and sometimes hidden histories of our city. Our walking tour Retelling the Hidden and Complicated Histories of Cardiff was included in the Being Human Festival.

Grow Your Own School 

This project, led by Dr Hannah Pitt in collaboration with Grow Cardiff, aims to enable more children to enjoy the wellbeing and educational benefits of gardening  by supporting schools with advice, training and resources. We have undertaken focus groups and interviews with teachers about the motivations, challenges and barriers to engaging children in growing activities, and the next stage of the project is to co-design and deliver ‘seed school’ workshops. This work is funded by UKRI IAA.  

Previous Projects

Children's Rights and Child Friendly Cities

I led on an ESRC funded project in WISERD as part of the Civil Society Research Centre investigating the articulation of Children’s Rights in different countries around the world, paying attention to ‘voice’, participation, inclusivity and stratification. A key focus of this project was the UNICEF Child Friendly Cities accreditation scheme as a vehicle for mobilising children's rights. We found that CFCs can reshape local government decision-making processes, allowing for greater opportunities for children's civic participation, through greater parity of children's interests and voices. However, CFC practitioners also encounter challenges related to uncertain conceptualisations of what makes a city ‘child-friendly’, complex governance structures, lack of political will from external partners and intergenerational tensions. In addition, age-based fragmentation has the potential to further marginalise the interests of children and young people in key policy areas.

Key findings from the project were shared with UK stakeholders at our  ‘Child-Friendly Cities: Progress and Prospects Roundtable’ and a practitioner report is forthcoming. 

During this time I also contributed to the development and distribution of the WISERD Education Multi-Cohort Study and have written blogs on the role of children in climate activism , and on how children and young people have been influenced by COVID-19.

Civil Society and the Family

I spent two years as lead researcher on an ESRC funded WISERD Civil Society project exploring the intergenerational transmission of civic values, ideas and practices within families.  At the time the result of the EU Referendum led to conjecture about a generational divide in the political and civic values of different age groups in the UK. In 2017 I presented a workshop on Young People and Brexit at the Hay Festival with colleagues, exploring perceptions of a ‘generational divide’ and familial influences on young peoples’ political engagement in relation to education and engagement with different medias. I have also worked with partners at EYST to explore youth ethnic minority experiences of Brexit.

This mixed methods research project culminated in a book Civil Society and the Family published with  Policy Press as part of the Civil Society and Social Change book series, about how experiences in the family home can equip people to engage with political or community action. The book includes chapters on family arguments, dinnertime etiquette and female caring roles. I also wrote a methodological reflection on the power dynamics  of undertaking survey research with children at school by examining extraneous notes, scribbles and drawings  with Kate Moles and Jennifer Lyttleton-Smith

Higher Education, Social Justice and Civil Society

In both my research and my teaching, I am informed by a humanist understanding of the role of education in fostering human flourishing and emancipation, informed by human capabilities theory and critical pedagogy. My PhD research explored the extent to which universities are seen to foster (or stifle) skills and values beneficial to civil society, against a backdrop of massification and an intensified focus on graduate employability. My international comparative case study provides insights into the motivations and perspectives of students studying Business and Sociology in Britain and Singapore. More recently I have focussed on the experiences of those working in the HE sector and have written about the increasing use of casualised labour in UK academia. 

Teaching

I'm a Fellow of Advance HE and teach on a range of modules that explore elements of sociology of education and inequalities, including:

• Sociology of Education 
• Children and Childhood
• Radical Education
• Decolonising Social Sciences
• Solving Educational Problems
• Becoming a Social Scientist

Biography

Before I became a lecturer I spent six years as a post-doctoral researcher at Cardiff University. I joined WISERD in 2016 to work on a project exploring the role of family in peoples’ accounts of civic engagement – focussing on the values and behaviours that get shared between different generations. I then spent some time working on the Civil Society and Social Change book series before beginning an ESRC funded project on the civic expansion of children's rights. 

Prior to joining WISERD I worked at CUREMeDE where my primary focus was a longitudinal mixed methods evaluation of a generalist postgraduate medical education training programme. In this role I explored the rising importance of medical generalism and how it may trouble existing categories of professional identity.

I initially moved to Cardiff from the West Midlands in 2005 as an art and graphic design student. I studied for my BScEcon degree in Sociology at Cardiff University and continued in the School of Social Sciences to complete an ESRC funded MSc in Social Research Methods, and PhD focussing on the educational experiences and civic values of university students in Britain and Singapore.

Honours and awards

• Nomination for Personal Tutor of the Year (2022, 2023)
• Nomination for Most Uplifting Staff Member (2022)
• GW4 Cruciblee 2018
• Invited discussant at The Ethics of Sustainable Prosperity - Learned Society of Wales 2018

Professional memberships

• BERA (British Educational Research Association)
• FGEN (Feminist Gender Equality Network)
• IWA (Institute of Welsh Affairs)
• ERNOP (European Research Network on Philanthropy)
• ISTR (International Society for Third Sector Research) 
• Learned Society of Wales
• Fellow of Advance HE

Academic positions

• 2016- 2021: Research Associate at WISERD
• 2014-2016: Research Associate at CUREMeDE
• 2010-2014: PhD Candidate, Cardiff University
• 2010-2014: Graduate Tutor, Cardiff University

Speaking engagements

• Muddiman, E. (2023) Child-Friendly Cities: Progress and Prospects Roundtable’ 

• Muddiman, E. (2023) International Comparisons of Child Friendly Cities, at Cities and Children Summer school held in Butetown.

• Muddiman, E. and Powell, R. (2023) Child Friendly Cities: Progress and Prospects. UK UNICEF Research Network Meeting.

• Powell, R. and Muddiman, E, (Jun 2022) Thinking of the Children: Adult invocations of children and childhood in competing campaigns about the use of public space. WISERD lunchtime seminar.

• Muddiman, E. and Powell, R. (May 2021) Children’s Rights and Civic Stratification. WISERD Online Lunchtime Seminar.

• Hampton, J. and Muddiman, E.(2020) Home Learning in Wales during a Global Pandemic. WISERD Lunchtime seminar.

• Muddiman, E. (2020) Civil society for Families during Lockdown: what can home life tell us about civic engagement? WISERD Lunchtime seminar

• Invited speaker at Sustainable Foodwork: Gendered, Classed and Racialised Labour, University of Bristol (May 2019)

• Panel member at ‘Questioning the Generation Game in Contemporary Politics: Young vs. Old?’ Political Studies Association Conference Roundtable (March 2018).

•  Discussant at The Ethics for Sustainable Prosperity for All. Learned Society of Wales International Symposium. Magdalene College, Cambridge (September 2018).

• Invited speaker at Family and Civil Society: Across the Generations Symposium. NCVO London, November 2018.

Committees and reviewing

• Co-Chair of SOCSI Anti-Racism and Race Equality Committee 
• Peer reviewer for: Qualitative Research; Critical Studies in Education, Sociological Review 
• Peer reviewer for entries to the SAGE Methods Qualitative Dataset. 

Supervisions

• Inequalities in education: experiences and outcomes
• Critical university studies 
• Activism, protest and social movements
• Civil society and volunteering
• Life stages and intergenerational relationships 
• Youth engagement, intergenerational justice
• Decolonial, post-colonial and anti-colonial critique 

Current supervision

Rania Vamvaka-Tatsi

Research student

Jack Hogton

Research student

Penny Dinh

Research student

Rhianna Murphy

Research student

Kristina Addis

Research student

Laura Owens

Research student