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Department of Geography

Current Postgraduate Students

Matt Finn, BA, MA (Research Methods)

Research Postgraduate (PhD) in the Department of Geography
Telephone: 41815/41817
Fax: +44 (0) 191 33 41801
Room number: W601

Contact Matt Finn (email at m.d.finn@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

I grew up near Wimbledon in London (of Wombles and tennis fame) and completed my undergraduate degree in Human Geography and Masters in Research Methods at Durham. I am currently in the second year of a PhD exploring how ideas about education and the future come together in schools. A particular focus is the place of data in the making and contestation of those futures.

Through my work there is a consistent thread of engagement with schools and the relations conducted with and within them. My undergraduate dissertation, "Men in primary schools: negotiated masculinities in a feminised space?" began this as an exploration of questions of gender, identity and space in primary schools.

My Master's thesis considered "How to hear a voice? ‘Student Voice’ and exploring Participatory Action Research in a school" investigating the practice of 'Student Voice' and what it might mean for understandings of voice in Participatory Action Research.

My PhD research continues this theme through work which explores the school as a site for the production of futures and so more broadly the relationship of education to futurity. I’m investigating the everyday ways in which various people in a school seek to imagine various possible futures and enact them in the present. In focusing on the changing role and scope of data in contemporary schooling in the UK I consider the place of data in the process of education and the production of futures.

Before becoming a student at Durham I had a variety of jobs including being a Human Resources Administrator with a City Council, an unqualified teacher, a local education administrator and a church-based pastoral worker with students.

I would like to acknowledge the ESRC funding of my postgraduate studies (grant number 000471227).

Is supervised by

Publications

Journal papers: academic