Teaching

Suzanne is a passionate and empathetic lecturer and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2024. Throughout her career she has prioritised widening access and put the student experience at the heart of her pedagogical practice. Her teaching combines research-led, globally-focused and conceptually sophisticated content, with methods, skills and employability driven classes. Her approach draws on a blend of lecturing, seminars, tutorials and field-teaching combining the classroom (or the field) with pedagogical ICT innovations to create a blended learning environment – something she adopted well in advance of the Covid pandemic. Suzanne is committed to a transformative student experience that connects cutting edge content and high-quality delivery, with innovation in modes of assessment and student support. In her roles as Course Director for the Geography programmes and Active Learning Champion she endeavours to enthuse and support other members of staff in adopting this approach.

Suzanne teaches across the undergraduate degree programmes, and convenes a research-focused optional module for final year students EGM533 Geographies of Transnationalism. She has a passion for ensuring an excellent student experience and widening access in higher education. In 2020 she led a team which was awarded £8095 from the Faculty of Life and Health Science’s Widening Access and Participation seed funding scheme to run a series of events with local schools, culminating in a summer school for sixth-form students. She is one of Ulster University's Access Ambassadors in recognition of her work with the Fostering Network in Northern Ireland.

Research

Suzanne is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work exists at the intersection of human geography, sociology and education with a growing international reputation in the field of migration and the transnational lives of young people. Her work has transformed the field of international student mobility – one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing fields of migration research – extending its focus into the practices and politics of recruitment and the spaces of student experience. She has a track-record of successful grant capture from UKRI and other prestigious sources and in December 2021 was awarded an AHRC standard research grant (FEC £372,287, August 2022 – July 2024, Co-Is Dr Sara McDowell (Ulster University) and Dr Mark Holton (University of Plymouth)) analysing the citizenships and identities of young people living alongside the Irish Border. This innovative, participatory project works with young people (aged 16 to 24) using filmmaking, digital ethnographies and archival data to analyse the challenges Brexit presents to them and how they see the world around them, the project therefore has significant ramifications for the future of the Northern Irish Constitution.

She has a sustained track record of publishing high quality and impactful publications which command a significant readership. Her first research monograph, The Geographies of International Student Mobility: Spaces, Places and Decision-Making, was published with Palgrave MacMillan in 2019. She has published in an array of high impact journals including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Urban Studies, Social and Cultural Geography, Geoforum, Area and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

AHRC, 2022-2024 (FEC £372,287) Bordered Youth: Analysing Citizenship and Identities in Post-Brexit Northern Ireland. Principal Investigator.

Returning Carers Scheme (Ulster University), 2019-2020 (£2010, The Gansey Project: Knitwear geographies and regional heritage)

Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), 2017/18 (£3000, SRG05/17, Title: Experiencing the International Higher Education Recruitment Fair: The Role of Geography when Selling a UK Higher Education)

Healy, E (in progress) Unionism, Identity and Citizenship in a Twenty-First Century Northern Ireland: Brexit, Young People and the Changing Geographies of the Island of Ireland. (First Supervisor)

Fox, O (in progress) Mobile Lives: Analysing Changing Patterns of Student Mobilities in a Post-Pandemic World. (First Supervisor)

Rea, N (in progress) Memory-Politics, Gender, and the Irish Border: An analysis of activism practices occurring surrounding Mother and Baby Homes Across the island of Ireland. (Third Supervisor)

Watson, N (in progress) Considering cloth: analysing the motivations for cloth nappy use amongst parents in the UK and Ireland. (First Supervisor)

Reynolds, K (2017) Eco-nationalism, Eco-conflict & Eco-peace: the political ecological dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Second Supervisor)