We are delighted to announce that School of SSESW academic, Professor Tess Maginess, has been awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Research Engagement.

Queen’s Pro Vice-Chancellor Emma Flynn announced Tess as this year’s recipient: ‘Collaborations and partnerships form a vital element to high quality research and our academics have strived to support existing relationships and develop new networks in some of the most challenging circumstances we have faced in recent times. Tess has shown exemplary commitment to Research Engagement, consistently going over and above to work in an inclusive and collaborative way. She is currently involved in many highly engaged projects and continues to integrate engagement into all her work.’

Tess outlined the work leading to her being awarded the Research Engagement Prize:

‘For the past 20 years, the Open Learning Programme in the School of SSESW has conducted award-winning research on innovative engaged pedagogies with community-based partners, especially disadvantaged groups. This work has focused on ‘grand challenge’ themes for communities, including mental health and ageing. Valuing partners’ expertise, our Open Learning approach is to co-design programmes with partners and to offer accredited workshop learning, with proper support systems for participants.

We received Engaged Research funding and a School of SSESW research grant to develop an international partnership with the University of Fraser Valley, British Columbia, to devise a Photovoice project. This arts-based collaboration uses a workshop approach with rural migrant women in British Columbia and Northern Ireland, to explore experiences of exclusion and belonging. It will create recommendations for policy and relevant lifelong learning initiatives for this often intersectorally excluded group. We have developed a partnership with University of Atypical, a disability arts NGO, who will help us create a website and exhibition to disseminate the project widely. The project creates rich international opportunities for the women participants to engage in knowledge exchange and intercultural learning, capacity building and mentoring.

We were commissioned to deliver a Professional Skills Certificate pilot online module on Cultural Understanding for Queen’s undergraduates, based on five Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) themes: Valuing Black Lives; Climate Change; Ageing; Intercultural Understanding – Migrant Experiences; and Active Civic Democracy. Literature, film and music were incorporated to really connect with learners about key ‘Real World’ topics.

We received over £8,000 from the Arts Council to deliver a co-designed programme with older people, called Artage (Arts and older people), focusing on representations of ageing in literature. It builds on my research with students on learning and ageing and on dementia in literature. The partnership is between Open Learning, Age NI, Commission for Older People and u3a. The results will be disseminated through a website created with the help of The Nerve Centre, national experts in creative digital arts.

Funded by an Engaged Research grant, we developed a research project on community lifelong learning needs. We surveyed community and voluntary groups commonly marginalised, including The Migrant Centre NI, Transgender NI and Disability Action. The survey revealed interest in co-designing a course in collaboration with QUB Open Learning. In Phase two, we interviewed community stakeholders. Topics on the resulting course included Understanding Northern Ireland for BAME communities and Active Citizenship Through an LGBTQI Lens.’