Dr Deirdre McKay comes to the Deputy Director role with a deep personal commitment to collaborative research which has already built key external partnerships for Keele. She has led and shaped a range of effective collaborations in community development, partnering with grassroots organisations, charities, NGOs, local government and national agencies throughout her career in Area Studies and Human Geography. She’ll bring the lessons learned from her partnership work to support broader cross-Faculty collaborations. Colleagues may be familiar with her exhibition-based work, hung by Arts@Keele as Curating Development which was funded by AHRC GCRF and the ESRC Festival of Social Science in partnership with London-based Filipino community NGO Kanlungan. Her Subversive Plasticity exhibition, produced in collaboration with Keele partners B-arts, was supported by Keele Innovation Fund and FNS Outreach awards, and most recently appeared in St Mary’s Church, Nantwich, hosted by Sustainable Nantwich.

 

In her role as KISI Deputy Director Deirdre will chair the University's Public Engagement with Research network and will introduce the new Community-Centred, Collaborative methodologies (C3M) Network at Keele.