Long-term casualised academics - EDICa

In Their Own Time

Outputs from Flexible Fund project by Dr Cécile Ménard, Dr Lena Wånggren & artist Maria Stoian, challenging conventional funding structures to include intersectionally underrepresented casualised academics.

Published : 30/08/2025

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This project received funding from EDICa’s Flexible Fund Round 2. The project aimed to examine how current funding structures, expectations of a linear career, and gendered and ableist expectations of unpaid labour hinder access to career progression opportunities. The project shed light on the invisibilised labour, time required and expected, and obstacles encountered by these groups before and during the grant-writing process, revealing exclusions inherent in conventional funding structures.

A website forms the core of the project output. https://in-their-own-time.ed.ac.uk/ Read about each of the eight profiled academics and their personal stories through a series of bespoke comics created by illustrator Maria Stoian.

But you will need to view it “in your own time”. It’s worth the wait.

Steph’s story

Steph is a migrant academic, researcher, teacher and single mum. She highlights the difficulty of juggling an academic career and childcare. Alongside her fight for better care for her child, who is disabled, Steph battles changing immigration rules – as a precariously employed migrant parent, she juggles childcare, visa extensions, and grant applications.

Read more at https://in-their-own-time.ed.ac.uk/academics/steph/

Other resources

EDICa hosts a regular blog and seminars, as well as collecting a library of resources of equality, diversity & inclusion practices in research & innovation.

An abstract graphic graphic of test tubs bubbling with a magnifying glass over it.

Writing and Evaluating Narrative CVs

Date: 18th August 2025 –

Outputs from EDICa Flexible Fund project on the creation and use of narrative CVs.

The Ideal Academic – infographic

Date: 10th Aug 2025-

Kate Sang’s infographic on The Ideal Academic in PNG and PDF formats.

A keyboard with both Latin and Korean characters, with a hand hovering over the enter key.

The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science

Date: 18th July 2023 –

Article from PLOS Biology – The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science, detailing with quantitative and qualitative data the barriers facing researchers.

Dr Anjali Mazumder

AI and Justice and Human Rights Theme Lead

The Turing Institute

Anjali Mazumder is the Theme Lead on AI and Justice & Human Rights. Her work focuses on empowering government and non-profit organisations by co-designing and developing responsible and inclusive data and AI methods, tools and frameworks for safeguarding people from harm – particularly those most vulnerable, building resilient institutions and systems, and accelerating the opportunity for inclusive, fair and just services, systems, economies, and communities. She is passionate about fostering multi-disciplinary collaborations and multi-sector partnerships to co-create pathways for innovation that improves services, policy, and actions to safeguard human rights and address humanitarian challenges. Her research interests are in developing integrated Bayesian decision support systems to manage uncertainty with complex data structures, value of evidence, causal reasoning in the wild; expert judgement; detecting bias and algorithmic fairness; socio-technical solutions to harnessing multiple disparate sources of data whilst enabling responsible and inclusive data and AI principles and practices; communicating uncertainty and risk; and safeguarding rights and the Rule of Law.

She has over 15 years’ experience tackling fundamental statistical problems of societal importance – human rights, justice, security, the Law, education, public health & safety – working at the interface of research, policy and practice in the UK, the US, and Canada, fostering multi-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborations. She was appointed to Canada’s National DNA Databank Advisory Committee (2012-2018) and currently serves on the UK Forensic Science Regulator’s fingerprint interpretation subgroup, and the senior management board of the UK’s Policy and Evidence Centre for Modern Slavery and Human Rights. She has also served the Royal Statistical Society in a variety of ways, most recently appointed to the Statistics & Law Section and the Data Science Section committees. She holds a doctorate in Statistics from the University of Oxford and two masters’ degrees in Measurement and Evaluation, and Statistics from the University of Toronto.

Dr Jenny Douglas

Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion
Faculty of Wellbeing, Education & Language Studies

Dr Jenny Douglas is passionate about the health and wellbeing of black women as evidenced through her research and public engagement. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies and completed her doctoral thesis on cigarette smoking and identity among African-Caribbean young women in contemporary British society. This research brought together two divergent research traditions: medical public health and health promotion approaches with sociological approaches to researching cigarette smoking. This interdisciplinary research approach brings together sociology, public health and women’s studies. Her commitment to comparative approaches finds expression not only in working across disciplinary and national boundaries, but also across theoretical and methodological traditions. Her research is both varied and wide ranging spanning 30 years on issues of race, health, gender and ethnicity. The key theme unifying her research and activism is intersectionality – exploring how ‘race’, class and gender affect particular aspects of African – Caribbean women’s health.

Jenny Douglas established and chairs the Black Women’s Health and Wellbeing Research Network. (www.open.ac.uk/black-womens-health-and-wellbeing) and her ambition is to establish a research institute on the health and wellbeing of black women. She is a contributing author to ‘Inside the Ivory Tower’.

Jenny Douglas is a Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at the Open University. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of York, an MA in Sociological Research in Health Care from the University of Warwick, an MSc in Environmental Pollution Control from the University of Leeds and a BSc (Hons) in Microbiology and Virology from the University of Warwick. She is module lead of the K311 – ‘Promoting Public Health’, is an honorary member of the Faculty of Public Health and is a director of the UK Public Health Register.

Jenny is a Research Affiliate of the Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychology at The George Washington University, Washington D.C., USA.