Staff Profile

Anna started my academic career as a nuclear structure physicist, completing a PhD in Nuclear Physics at the University of Liverpool in 1996. She studied superdeformed states in the mass-190 region using the techniques of gamma-ray spectroscopy.  After a post-doc position at York and a couple of visiting periods at CNRS-Orsay in France, she took up a position at the Australian National University. It was there that she discovered how much she loved, and was fascinated by, teaching and learning. She took a Graduate Certificate and then a Masters in Higher Education, run through ANU's Centre for Educational Development and Academic Methods (CEDAM). This was when she started working with Gerlese Akerlind (a key figure in Phenomenograhic Research) and her excellent colleagues Kate Wilson (no relation), Pam Roberts, Denise Higgins and Susan Howitt.  They were all interested in undergraduate students' experiences of research, among other things. As a result of the research they undertook in that area, she also found herself increasingly drawn to working with colleagues, both to understand their experiences of teaching and to help them learn and develop as teachers. She became the Associate and then Deputy Director (Education) of the Research School of Physics and Engineering, and was seconded part time to contribute to CEDAM's programmes. She also spent a year seconded part time to the University of Canberra's Teaching and Learning Centre, where she had the opportunity to contribute to strategic developments around work-based learning and interdisciplinarity as well as research-led education.

After a while she says that she began to feel guilty about playing at being an education researcher when she had had very little training in the field. After all she says, 'we'd never have let someone who had been a teacher march into the accelerator lab and start running experiments - or worse still, tell us how we ought to be running them'. So, after a brief period as an academic developer at Oxford University's Learning Institute, she took the plunge, went back to full-time studenthood, and undertook a second PhD in education at the University of Stirling. This was where she discovered Deleuze, Actor Network Theory (ANT), sociomateriality and more. 

Since then, she has worked as a post-doc on a Horizon 2020 project (Commonfare.net), leading on the HCI and social research needed to design an ethical reputation system, and as a lecturer in Lifelong Learning at the University of Stirling.

Her current research projects are:

• Waste Stories (a Leverhlume Trust Research Project)
• Water and Fire (a Global Challenges Research Fund project in collaboration with the University of Stirling, the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation, the University of Cape Town and the University of Western Cape).

Her recent completed research projects are:

• Data Commons Scotland (an EPSRC Investigator-led project, led by Dr Greg Singh of the University of Stirling): https://campuspress.stir.ac.uk/datacommonsscotand
• Telling Data Stories (an Edinburgh Futures Institute project led by Dr Jen Ross of the University of Edinburgh): https://datastories.de.ed.ac.uk

Selected Publications: 

Ross, J. and Wilson, A. (2024) Reconfiguring surveillance futures for higher education using speculative data stories. In: Bonderup Dohn, N., Jaldemark, J., Öberg, L.-M., Mozelius, P., Marcia Håkonsson Lindqvist, M., Ryberg, T. and de Laat, M. (eds.) Sustainable Networked Learning: Individual, Sociological and Design Perspectives. Series: Research in networked learning. Springer. (In Press)

Wilson, A. , Hamilton, H., Singh, G. and Lockley, P. (2024) Open is not enough: designing for a networked data commons. In: Bonderup Dohn, N., Jaldemark, J., Öberg, L.-M., Mozelius, P., Håkonsson Lindqvist, M., Ryberg, T.and de Laat, M. (eds.) Sustainable Networked Learning: Individual, Sociological and Design Perspectives. Series: Research in networked learning. Springer. (In Press)

Wilson, A. (2023) From Crime and Punishment to Future Archaeologies – reimagining relationships of waste and value. In: Jordan-Baker, C. and Holloway, P. (eds.) Writing Landscape and Setting in the Anthropocene.Palgrave Macmillan. (Accepted for Publication)

Wilson, A. and Ross, J. (2023) Surveillance imaginaries: learning from participatory speculative fiction. Surveillance and Society, (Accepted for Publication)

Wilson, A. , De Paoli, S. and Rough, D. (2023) What counts as contribution? Micro-practices of enrolment and exclusion in a financial problems support group. First Monday, 28(2),(doi: 10.5210/fm.v28i2.11756)

Howitt, S. M., Wilson, A. N. and Higgins, D. M. (2023) Unlearning, uncovering and becoming: experiencing academic writing as part of undergraduate research. Teaching in Higher Education, (doi: 10.1080/13562517.2022.2145466) (Early Online Publication)

Rough, D., De Paoli, S. and Wilson, A. (2023) Commonshare: a new approach to social reputation for online collaborative communities. Social Science Computer Review, 41(1), pp. 4-26. (doi: 10.1177/08944393211028191)

Beetham, H., Collier, A., Czerniewicz, L., Lamb, B., Li, Y., Ross, J., Scott, A.-M. and Wilson, A.(2022) Surveillance practices, risks and responses in the post pandemic university. Digital Culture and Education, 14(1), pp. 16-37.

Wilson, A. (2021) Learning to see with Deleuze: understanding affective responses in image-viewer research assemblages. Qualitative Research, 21(6), pp. 906-922. (doi: 10.1177/1468794120946979)

Wilson, A. , Howitt, S., Holloway, A., Williams, A.-M. and Higgins, D. (2021) Factors affecting paramedicine students’ learning about evidence‐based practice: a phenomenographic study. BMC Medical Education, 21, 45. (doi: 10.1186/s12909-021-02490-5)(PMID:33435971) (PMCID:PMC7802292)