Saskia Warren

I joined Manchester in January 2015 as a Lecturer in Human Geography, and became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2017. My research engages with voices excluded or marginalised in discourse, policy and practice in the distinct yet overlapping fields of the cultural and creative economies. In particular my research attends to geographies of creativity and difference, with especial interest in matters of faith and religion, notions of ethnicity, culture, gender, and spaces of education and labour.

From October 1st 2017 I was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship. Across a period of 24 months I am working on a programme of research for the project: Geographies of Muslim Women and the UK Cultural and Creative Economy (AKA 'CreativeMuslimWomenUK'). Related to this research, I was awarded best paper and presentation by the Nordic Geographers' Meeting held in Stockholm in 2017, for “Placing faith in creative labour: work-based activism of Muslim women in the UK cultural and creative economy” in the session Cultural Production Within, Against and Beyond Inequalities. For more on this research and related news see: http://www.creativemuslimwomen.manchester.ac.uk/

Prior to taking my current post, I held the position of Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. During my time at Birmingham I worked on a flagship multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral AHRC-funded research project, Cultural Intermediation: Connecting Communities in the Creative Urban Economy. I was further Principle Investigator on a Communities and Culture Network+/EPSRC project, Birmingham Surrealist Laboratory.

My research and consultancy has been funded by Heritage Lottery Fund, Collections Trust, Arts Connect, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

I have peer reviewed widely for high profile international journals in Geography and cognate disciplines, including: Progress in Human Geography, Antipode, Cultural Geographies, Social and Cultural Geography, Area, International Journal of Heritage Studies, M/C: Journal of Media and Culture, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Cultural Trends. I have also widely reviewed funding applications, including for the Irish Research Council.

The research I undertake on issues of inequality and diversity informs the administration role I hold of Geography lead for Athena Swan, SEED, University of Manchester, and my previous role on the committee for Athena Swan, GEES, University of Birmingham.