{"id":872,"date":"2020-07-16T17:07:35","date_gmt":"2020-07-16T17:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.magneticideals.org\/home\/?page_id=872"},"modified":"2025-05-07T14:00:42","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T14:00:42","slug":"heather-mcknight","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.magneticideals.org\/home\/people-2\/heather-mcknight\/","title":{"rendered":"Heather McKnight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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ResearchGate: https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/profile\/Heather-Mcknight<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linkedin: https:\/\/uk.linkedin.com\/in\/hmcknight<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heather McKnight is one of the co-founders of the Magnetic Ideals Collective, which works on projects that use creative and artistic ways of bringing communities together to create social change. She is currently working on resaerch around Hygiene Poverty and Creativity and on collective care cafes for eco-anxiety, and for menopause and mental health. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She completed her PhD in Law Studies at the University of Sussex Law Department entitled ‘Reimagining the University through Resistance’ (2021) which addressed joint working between trade unions and students’ unions and their approaches to academic freedom. Since then, she has worked on research mapping anti-precarity movements across Europe<\/a> for the European Society of Social Anthropologists . She has also conducted research on the School Strikes Climate movement publshing three peer reviewed articles on the topic, and on the represenation of activism in young adult television show Utopia Falls. Please see ResearchGate <\/a>for publications. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, she has taken the Magnetic Ideals project on Menopause and Mind, creating a separate organisation to campaign for inclusive menopause representation and support and provide art-based support for those struggling with mental health during the menopause transition. Her 2024 research report, “I Suffer in Silence”<\/a>, explores the troubling experiences with mental health that many have during the menopause transition in Brighton and Hove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diverse creative modes of engagement for development, training and research have always been a passion, and she is an experienced trainer with over 20 years of experience in developing and delivering training and a researcher in students’ unions, colleges, universities, and the public sector, as well as an activist and artist. Coming from a working background in equalities, campaigning and education research, she has worked for charities, students\u2019 unions and local government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heather operates as a critical utopian scholar with research interests in unions, protest, education, feminism, gender, aesthetics, utopian analysis of science fiction television, and speculative fiction. She has worked to preserve the archives of the National Union of Students and has been involved in relocating them to the Modern Records Centre in Warwick where they will soon be available as a public interest archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her teaching experience includes modules on Public Law and Order and Disorder (covering Law, Politics and Sociology) and MA seminars on critical theory at the University of Sussex, and the Self and Society Module on poststructuralism at the University of Brighton. She also has a background in student engagement and pedagogical research working in partnership projects between institutions and students’ unions and has delivered numerous research projects and developed training in these areas that have been delivered to students, and university staff from teaching staff and administrators to senior management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was the co-founder of the Critical Studies Journal at the University of Brighton, serving on the editorial board for three years and has also been the Co-Editor of Excursions Journal at the University of Sussex. She is a founding member of the anti-racist and trans-inclusive CHASE Feminist Network, which reaches across nine universities in the South East of England, aiming to create spaces of resistance in what continues to be a patriarchal higher education sector with ongoing and intersectional discrimination happening at all levels. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a full work history please see Linkedin Profile<\/a> Creative work<\/a> Google Scholar<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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