Dr Barbara Merrill is an Associate Professor. She teaches undergraduate modules, supervises dissertation students and undertakes research. She offers PhD supervision in the following areas, adult student experiences in further, higher and community education, gender, class and adult education, biographical narrative research and adult education, issues of access, retention and drop-out and learning experiences and learner identity.

Biography and Research Interests
Barbara is involved in several European and national research projects. Her research interests include access issues and experiences of adult students in community adult education, further and higher education, social inclusion and lifelong learning, gender and class and adult education, citizenship, regeneration and biographical methods.

Barbara is currently working on the (Word Document)ESREA Access, Learning Careers and Identities Conference 2015, an Erasmus+ EDUPRO research project: (Word Document)Promoting Lifelong Learning in HE by Implementing Innovative Practices in Recognition of Prior Learning, an Erasmus+ EMPLOY Research Project:
(Word Document)Enhancing the Employability of Non-Traditional Students in HE and an Erasmus+ and EDUFIN Research Project:
(Word Document)Developing participative processes for the generation of a financial education curriculum addressed to young adults at risk.

Barbara is a member of the Standing Council on University Teaching and Research in the Education of Adults (SCUTREA), a member of the Steering Committee for the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), co-ordinator of the Access, Learning Careers and Identities ESREA Network and a member of the Global University Network for Innovation (GUNI). Barbara is also a member of the Editorial Boards of Studies in the Education of Adults and is the Book Review Editor for the journal. Barbara has recently co-ordinated an eight-partner EU funded project (Lifelong Learning Programme) on Access, Retention and Drop-out (RANLHE) and a project funded by CEDEFOP entitled Learning for Career and Labour Market Transitions: Individual Biographies with Professor Alan Brown and Professor Jenny Bimrose in the Institute of Employment Research (IER) at Warwick.

Linden West is Professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University and Visiting Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca; and formerly Visiting Professor at the University of Paris Nanterre. Linden jointly coordinates the ESREA Life History and Biography research network with Laura Formenti and Alan Bainbridge.

He was previously Reader and Co-Director of the Centre for International Studies of Diversity and Participation and Principal Lecturer in the Department of Post-Compulsory Education at CCCU; and Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Kent and Principal Research Fellow at the University of East London; and worked earlier in his career as a researcher in adult education at the University of Keele.  Linden has been a senior administrator for the UK Workers Educational Association (WEA), as well as in further education and for Local Education Authorities.  

He has written widely on educational processes, formal, non-formal and informal, lifewide and lifelong, using interdisciplinary, auto/biographical and narrative research. His books include Distress in the City: racism, fundamentalism and a democratic education published recently by Trentham Books; Beyond Fragments, adults, motivation and higher education, a biographical analysis, published by Taylor and Francis, as well as Doctors on the edge, healing and learning in the inner city, Fabooks. He co-authored Using biographical methods in social research, and co-edited Psychoanalysis and Education and Constructing Narratives of Continuity and Change: a transdisciplinary approach to researching lives, Routledge. And most recently, Researching Critical Reflection, also published by Routledge.

Recent articles include: (2016) Resisting the enormous condescension of posterity: Richard Henry Tawney, Raymond Williams and the long struggle for a democratic education. International Journal of Lifelong Education. (With Hazel Reid) (2016) Negotiating professional and personal biographies in a liquid world: creating space for reflexive innovation in career counselling. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, DOI: 10.1080/03069885.2016.1145014. (2016) Pedagogies of Love and Hate: self-recognition in Islamist groups and workers’ education in the United Kingdom. Pedagogia Oggi. 1, 16. (2016), The power to illuminate; auto/biographical narrative research into the good democratic educational group and its enemies. Culture, biography and Lifelong Learning. Busan, S. Korea.  (2014) Transformative learning and the form that transforms: towards a psychosocial theory of recognition using auto/biographical narrative research. Journal of Transformative Education, 12, 2, 164-179. Linden is a member of the Scientific Committees of Cliopsy, Biography, Culture and Lifelong Learning and the International Journal of Transformative Education.

He also works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.

Alan Bainbridge is a Chartered Psychologist, Doctor of Clinical Science and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and began working in Higher Education in 2001 having previously taught in secondary schools for 18 years. He is interested in the contested space between psychoanalytic thought and practices to education in its widest sense. He has written on how educational professionals develop their professional practice, the nature of academic understanding and is currently exploring the fetish in education and how learning and the ‘natural world’ are interconnected. Alan has recently used narrative and biographical techniques to research the motivators and barriers towards a community engagement project and the attitude of individuals towards the re-introduction of native wild carnivores. He uses his experience as a UKCP registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist to inform his research and as such works qualitatively to seek to provide opportunities and spaces where participants can provide rich contextual data of their life experiences. He is the co-ordinator for the Faculty of Education Auto/biography and Narrative Research and Knowledge Exchange Theme Group.

Laura Formenti is Professor of General and Social Pedagogy at the University of Milano Bicocca, in Italy; she is also joint convenor of the ESREA Life History and Biography Network and present Chair of ESREA. Her research interests focus on adult learning and education as systemic and complex phenomena, embodied and embedded in layered contexts (family, organization, community, territory, society). She edited Embodied Narratives (Southern Denmark University, 2014, with L. West and M. Horsdal) and Stories that Make a Difference (Pensa, 2016, with L. West), from ESREA LHBN Conferences.

Assistant Professor, Researcher  in  Nursing Sciences  at the University of Turin. Professor at the Nursing and Midwifery Master’s  Program. She creates and teaches at several post-graduate courses for health care  professionals and educators. Speaker to thirty national and international conferences on topics relating to innovative teaching methods  and other clinical subjects in health care systems. Board member of the Italian Society of Medical Education (SIPeM) since  2003. Board member of PRAQSI INTERNATIONAL (Réseau multinational  de recherche & de réflexion à partir de la Pratique Quotidienne des Soins Infirmiers)  since  2002,   Member of the founding committee  of  IRACLIA (Gruppo Interuniversitario di Ricerca sulle Azioni della Cura: Linguaggi Immagini Apprendimento) since 2014,   Board member of the  Italian Society for Nursing Sciences (SISI) since 2016, and  now of  the Italian Society of  Systemic Medicine (ASSIMSS).  She has been utilizing  the Narration and Filmography  methodologies  for years as a training device for excellence. 

Barbara Bruschi is associate Professor of Digital Storytelling at the Department of Educational Sciences – Turin University. She has been manager and participant in different research project about digital storytelling, such as: “Values education with media: digital storytelling and intergenerational relationships”; “How to Do Things with Stories”; "Ludodigitalstories” (http://www.ludodigitalstories.it/); "

STORIE IN CIRCOLO: digital storytelling per alimentare speranza e saperi

"; Commons project - Heritage in common shared stories (http://commons.network/).

Born in Naples (Italy) on May 17th, 1955.
Graduated with honors in Medicine at the University of Ancona on March 1982. Post graduate diploma in Hygiene and Preventive Medicine on July 1986.

From 1984 to 1987 worked as a Public Health Specialist at the Public Health Service of Ivrea (TO) and from 1987 to 1992 as a Public Health Specialist at the Public Health Service of Orbassano (TO) under the direction of the Department of Public Health, University of Torino.

Associate Professor of Hygiene from 1992 to 2005 with teaching responsibilities at the Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences of the University of Torino for two academic years. In 1993 moved to the Faculty of Educational Sciences.
Full Professor of Hygiene since 2005, now in charge of the Department of Public Health and Pediatrics of University of Turin with responsibilities for the courses of Health Education and the broader area of Health Promotion.

Research Activities

Major themes treated: elderly disability, children accidents and health status in migrants, addressing focusing on risk factors assessment and evaluation of determinants of disability; inequality in health with in-depth analyses on psychosocial determinants of health, and health education interventions effectiveness.
Besides the research activity, she contributed to the national debate concerning the development of the profile of the public health professional and about innovations in training.
Since the year 2000 has joined the international Health Behavior in School Aged Children (HBSC) research group, for which is now coordinator for the HBSC national study development.

DR. ANDREA GALIMBERTI

Andrea Galimberti is Post-doc Researcher at the Department of Human Sciences “Riccardo Massa”, University of Milano Bicocca. His research interests are connected to lifelong learning and mainly focused on transitions in learning and professional careers. He explores these themes through auto/biographical methods and from systemic and constructionist perspectives. From 2013 he is joint convenor of the ESREA network "Access, Learning Careers and Identities".