LGBT youth identity and policy and transgender health
Dr Lucy Jones, Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics, School of English, Faculty of Arts
Dr Jones sits on the Arts Faculty EDI Board. She is currently the School of English Lead for the Athena SWAN Self-Assessment Team and the School's Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. She also reviews Athena SWAN submissions for the national Equality Challenge Unit. Her research areas include language, gender, sexuality, queer theory, ethnography and critical discourse analysis.
Her current research focuses on LGBT youth groups in Yorkshire and the Midlands across four socio-economically diverse regions. The project combines ethnography with discourse analysis to examine the strategies used by young people to negotiate norms and ideologies of gender and sexuality in their everyday interaction. Specifically, the project is focused on intersectionality to consider how factors such as the young people’s socioeconomic class, ethnicity, location, and support networks impact on their experiences as LGBT people and their subsequent identity constructions. The project is funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, which will also enable dissemination of the findings of the project. A key aim of the project is to inform social policy and practice related to the support of young LGBT people. Dr Jones is working with the Institute for Policy and Engagement on a manifesto for the Government Equalities Office to advise on Government LGBT policy while ensuring that the voices of the young people she works with reach the ears of those who make decisions about their lives.
Between September 2018 and July 2019, she was Principal Investigator on a collaborative project with Professor Louise Mullany (School of English) and Professor Alison Pilnick (School of Sociology and Social Policy) on autobiographical stories produced by patients at the Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health as part of their initial assessment process. The project has led to a better understanding of the typical challenges and experiences of patients prior to the start of their assessment, as well as the ways they overcome and manage distress during this process. The findings will inform the work of clinicians at the Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health assisting them in developing techniques to improve the quality of patients’ waiting time and reduce the distress they feel during the process.