Professor Leda Blackwood will speak about her research Reimagining Recruitment which examined why minority groups are not staying in academia. This research challenges 'leaky pipeline' and deficit explanations and offers a more dynamic understanding of how and why people are being excluded and the implications for intervention.

The Reimagining Recruitment project conducted a programme of research into the experiences and attitudes of early career academics and their potential future employers, funded by the EPSRC Inclusion Matters scheme. This scheme had the aim to improve equality, diversity and inclusion within the engineering and physical sciences. The proposal, explored how to drive culture change surrounding academic recruitment, especially at early career stages and from this evidence-based policy change recommendations are being made.

The research was embedded within, and disseminated through, the centrepiece activity: an innovative programme of collaborative incubator events. Incubators are domain-specific workshops, run by experts in that field, attended by academics at all career stages who formulate and/or solve interesting problems.

Leda Blackwood is a social psychologist with an interest in social identity processes entailed in group-based social inequalities and in how inequalities are experienced, reproduced, contested, and changed. Leda is currently conducting research in the experience and consequences of inequalities in higher education; how communities understand and respond to the lived experience of food poverty; and the role of charities in promoting social connection, social participation, and community well-being.