Perpetua Kirby

University of Sussex - Global Challenges Teaching Award: Climate Action

Perpetua Kirby is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, University of Sussex, and the Co-Deputy Director of the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth.

Perpetua has extensive experience researching children and young people's participation, voice and agency. Her PhD explored children’s agency in school, using ethnographic and creative multimodal approaches. Her current primary research interests are democratic schooling, and transformative pedagogies and practice, particularly related to environmental sustainability education. Working with interdisciplinary teams, her focus is on how to reconfigure education in ways that might embrace a creative engagement with the existential and uncertain dimensions of climate change and biodiversity loss. She conducts research in the Global South and North, in schools, informal education contexts and higher education.

Perpetua’s teaching includes an interdisciplinary undergraduate module in which students design, grow and harvest a campus forest food garden, as a means to consider sustainable and just responses to climate change and ecological disturbance. Fulbright offers the opportunity to explore how to foster trans-Atlantic dialogue so that students might respond to global challenges from a global perspective, while being attentive to local and regional impacts.

Perpetua is joined by her institutional team: Anke Schwittay and Charlie Crouch.