Dr Pippa Sterk

My work focuses on community construction in the context of social marginalisation. I am interested in the ways that community construction is experienced on an everyday basis, and how members of marginalised communities develop their own cultures, habits, signals, and internal power structures. I have written on subjects including LGBT+ educational leadership, linguistic racialisation in airport spaces, and collective care in academic group work.

My doctoral thesis centred on lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT+) student/staff networks in English Higher Education. I specifically focused on the ways that these networks can provide a more caring and communal vision of what Higher Education governance may look like.

I have since (co-)led two projects centred around creative and critical pedagogies. Both projects were co-created with students, and used collaging and zine-making to explore the everyday tensions and challenges of trying to establish caring communities in an educational environment that demands quick, easy results.

I am in the early stages of setting up a research project that examines the role of cultural capital in English communities of film curatorship.