Overview

Under these overarching themes a vibrant community of Keele academics are working collaboratively with external partners to address our current challenge areas:

• Learning from heritage, lived experience, and community innovation
• Inclusive and sustainable government
• Security, policing and justice
• Marginalisation, migration and diversity
• Inclusive education and skills

The Institute’s work seeks to identify, explain and overcome specific social, economic and cultural obstacles to social inclusion, in order to help groups in society realise their full potential.

KISI sponsors coCREATE, Keele's cross-faculty network for community-centred, creative and collaborative research methods.

In June 2018, partners and representatives from organisations from across the West Midlands attended a launch of the Institute at an event held at Keele University. Here, academics, practitioners and professionals explored the themes that the Institute looks to tackle.

Achieving a greater degree of social inclusion is of critical importance to the development of just, integrated, diverse, cohesive and thriving societies in an increasingly interdependent world. The global challenges that we are currently facing require multidisciplinary and collaborative responses with stakeholder partners.

The Institute fully acknowledges that single disciplines and academics working on their own cannot begin to adequately respond to new and unfolding challenges. As such the Institute has, and will continue to support, a wide range of multidisciplinary research projects and opportunities for co-producing research and innovation projects with stakeholder partners and research participants.

Inclusivity is at the heart of what we do. For Institute members, increasing social inclusion is not just an aim of our research, it is also central to our processes of doing research. As such our research endeavours are highly collaborative and benefit enormously from the insights, experiences and ‘lived knowledge’ of the stakeholder partners and the research participants we work with to respond to complex local, national, regional and global challenges.