Laura Kilby is Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Professor of Psychology, providing strategic leadership for research excellence, interdisciplinary collaboration, knowledge exchange, and external partnerships. She has extensive experience of developing research culture, capacity, and impact across higher education.
Laura’s research is grounded in critical discursive psychology and examines the construction, negotiation, and lived experience of marginalised identities. Her work has explored raced, classed, and gendered identities across a range of social contexts, with particular attention to how discourse both reflects and reproduces systems of power and inequality. Drawing on an intersectional perspective, she investigates the ways in which multiple dimensions of identity shape experiences of inclusion, exclusion, belonging, and discrimination. Her research advances understanding of the relationships between discourse, identity, power, and social change.
She is also an experienced qualitative methodologist with expertise in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and multimodal analysis. Her methodological work focuses on rigorous approaches to examining language, interaction, and meaning-making in everyday, institutional, and media contexts. She has particular expertise in researching sensitive and complex social issues and developing innovative qualitative approaches to understanding lived experience.
Through a portfolio of externally funded projects, Laura works within interdisciplinary teams to undertake applied research addressing social inequalities. Her recent work has included research on housing insecurity and homelessness, alongside projects exploring health inequalities among financially vulnerable communities. By bringing together academic, policy, professional, and community partners, she seeks to generate evidence that informs policy and practice and contributes to positive social change.