Eve Pennington, Economic & Social History, University of Manchester (2022 Cohort)

I am in my final year of a +3 studentship on the Economic and Social History pathway. My research explores the historical relationship between gender and state-sponsored urban development in late twentieth century Britain. I am particularly interested in how new built environments reflected and reinforced gender relations, whether women adhered to or subverted the roles prescribed by deterministic architecture and planning, and how gender intersected with other social relations such as class and race.

For the past year, I have been an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI) and Wellbeing Representative for the NWSSDTP. One of my favourite aspects of the role was facilitating a day-long writing retreat at Manchester back in April, in which students from various disciplines and institutions came together to work on their theses, fostering a sense of community and belonging. We hope to organise more writing retreats in the coming months (details to follow).

The other EDI & Wellbeing Reps and I have lots of other exciting plans for this academic year. We are currently in the process of developing an inclusion and wellbeing survey that will help to understand more about whether students feel supported and included by the NWSSDTP. The Reps at each institution will also be organising drop-in sessions each semester so that students can meet each other and discuss any issues with their peers which can then be fed back to the NWSSDTP. We will provide more information about the drop-in sessions in the near future, but in the meantime, you can email me or one of the other Reps directly with any concerns or suggestions.

As you will already know, an induction day is being held for new starters on Monday 11 November at the University of Liverpool as part of NWSSDTP Week (more details here https://nwssdtp.ac.uk/current-students/nwssdtp-week/). The other Reps and I will introduce ourselves at ‘Meet the Student Representatives’ event at midday. We are looking forward to welcoming the new cohort of NWSSDTP students – see you then!