Biography

Summary

Dr Annabel Tremlett is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work in the School of Health Sciences and Social Work, teaching on the undergraduate and Masters programme along with supervising PhD and Professional Doctorate students. At the University of Portsmouth, alongside her lecturing role Dr Tremlett is the lead for the MSc Social Work degree course (stage one), facilitates the service user inclusion group ‘SWIG’, is an active participant in the research clusters Transnational Europe and Global Health and Social Care, and sits on the Ethics Committee in the Science Faculty. Dr Tremlett is also a co-ordinator of the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership scheme run in conjunction with the Universities of Brighton and Southampton which has funding each year for over 30 PhD and postdoctoral fellowships.

Her research interests include investigating the life stories and everyday experiences of the childhood and family experiences of people from minority or marginalized groups. She is particularly interested in utilizing this research to think through issues around social justice, as well as challenging misleading representations. She has extensive expertise in ethnographic and photo elicitation research. Dr Tremlett has gained external funding from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and publishes her work in journals such as Identities, Ethnicities and Ethnic and Racial Studies as well as in exhibitions and other community events.

Her research has four main strengths: deep expertise in childhood and the lifecourse; an active concern about social justice, racism and minority integration; in-depth qualitative methodological skills; and expertise in visual sociology and cultures.

Background

Dr Tremlett was awarded her PhD in Cultural Studies from King’s College London in 2008. Her PhD that focused on the integration of Roma minorities in Hungary, comparing everyday lives of children and their families (particularly focuses on school) to broader policy and media discourses on integration and racism. The thesis was supervised by Professor Ben Rampton and Dr Roxy Harris, funded by the ESRC. The PhD awarded with no amendments. She completed post-doctoral research in Hungary with a British Academy institutional visit grant in 2008.

Since joining the University of Portsmouth in 2009, she has been awarded a Start-Up Award (2009) and a Research Mini-Grant (2010) to further her research on the visual and oral self-representations of minority groups. In 2013, she conducted research in Hungary to further her PhD research thanks to a British Academy Small Grant (2012-14), and gained two fellowships from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to research in Budapest with Hungarian academics (2014 and 2015). She has been a recipient of European Commission Funds (2014) to run a workshop on Roma integration and was invited to be a reviewer for the Commission’s FP7 research funding streams from 2012.

Annabel gained another British Academy Small Research Grant (2017-2019) to research the ways that self-representations and photographs of 'the everyday' can affect transformations in the way we see minority groups, such as Roma minorities. She is the recipient of an internal university grant to look at the wellbeing, citizenship and notions of belonging of migrants and their families in the UK (2019). Annabel has also attained a prestigious writing fellowship at the Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies in which she will focus on her monograph on the experiences and visual representations of Roma people from child to adulthood (April - July 2019).

Dr Tremlett has a proven track record in publications including 17 high quality journal articles and book chapters,  two special issues of journals, numerous working papers, media articles and two books with prestigious publishers (including a monograph due out in 2020/21).

Research interests

My research focuses on the interface between public and local representations of minority groups in Europe with a particular concern for Roma (sometimes known as Gypsy or Traveller) people and post-EU accession migrants.  One strand of my research uses longitudinal, ethnographic research with a group of Roma young people from Hungary, my research breaks free from the usual stigmatising public representations by allowing Roma people themselves to be the image-makers. The research has generated photographs taken by participants themselves along with interviews and observations of their everyday lives in projects spanning 17 years (2000, 2004-5, 2013, 2017), allowing a fascinating insight not just into Roma people’s everyday lives, but also how their lives have transitioned from child to adulthood. They were all children of about 7-8 years of age at the beginning of the research, and are now in their mid-20s, many now bringing up their own children. This research profoundly challenges the traditional views European societies have of Roma minorities.

The other strand in my research is looking at the experiences and integration of migrant children and their families. I have recently started a project looking at the wellbeing of migrants and their families in the UK, particularly those who carry out 'circular migration' (i.e. moving frequently back and forth from their 'home' countries to the UK) who tend to be from Central and Eastern European backgrounds.

Overall, my research focuses on the everyday, which means in-depth research with a focus on the art of listening and paying attention to how people’s self-representations differ from public representations, such as those used by the media or policy. I look at what this interface between the public and local representations means for the way people integrate into their communities and how they perceive their position in society. Hence my published work falls into three threads:

(i) Questioning how we can best access and attend to the voice of the child and other research participants in research and practice.

(ii) Understanding the power of visual representations (e.g. in the media, social policy and popular culture) and how research can challenge misleading images.

(iii) Focusing on the way language (and communication) is used in the research process and how that affect the way we (researchers) present that research and therefore affect the way we represent our research participants.

My research is regularly published in leading journals such as The Sociological Review, Ethnicities, Identities and Ethnic and Racial Studies.