Postgraduate Researchers' Summer Conference 2026

PGRSC2026 edition will take place on 16 and 17 June 2026, showcasing the research carried out by researchers across all MDX Faculties, our Collaborative Partner Institutions and our overseas campuses.

"Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places." (Haraway, 2016)

In response to these words, we invite our Postgraduate Researcher community to explore how research can respond to "Shifting Landscapes of Research in Critical Times". Our MDX Postgraduate Research community is united by a commitment to generate knowledge that addresses complex challenges, drives critical inquiry and contributes to society. The theme of this year's conference "Shifting Landscapes of Research in Critical Times", provides a space to collectively reflect on how research can be bold, adaptive and impactful in the face of critical challenges and transformative change.

The Summer Conference this year is chaired by Prof Jayne Osgood, Prof Johan Siebers, Ali Khoshkholghi, Sofia Atsopardi and Ammara Abid.

PGRSC2026 brings a diverse body of postgraduate researchers from all disciplines together to share how radical creativity can underpin critical enquiry. PGRSC has long been a key event in the MDX calendar – offering a vital opportunity to come together in celebration of research undertaken across faculties and our collaborative partner institutions. It is a vital opportunity to share ideas, create fruitful collaborations and crucially ‘dwell in a community’. The event includes an incredible line up of keynote addresses and performances from inspirational figures whose work squarely speaks to the theme of the conference. We hope that you will enjoy two-days bursting with engaging and lively debate. We feel certain that this in-person experience that will both challenge and inspire you.

All postgraduate researchers are invited to participate in the Middlesex University Research Students’ Summer conference. This annual conference is dedicated to showcasing the innovative research undertaken by our postgraduate students. Students across all faculties and partner institutions are invited to share their findings as well as their work in progress. The conference is conducted in a friendly and supportive manner to enable students to share work, network, and make connections across disciplines and faculties.

Announcing our upcoming keynote speakers

We are delighted to welcome two internationally recognised scholars who will be speaking at the PGRSC 2026.

Professor EJ Renold

Mobilising Matters: Staying with the political troubles in the field of Relationships and Sexuality Education

Drawing on Tess Lea’s book Wild Policy (2020) this multi‑modal presentation approaches policy not as a bounded, hierarchical apparatus "coming down from on high to “impact” communities in some totalizing way” but as an ambient and unruly force that "more often unfurls as a series of project stutters, misdirects, and meanderings” (2020, 15). Lea’s methodology of mapping policy ecologies and of attending to the human and more‑than‑human forces through which policy is made and moves, provides a conceptual frame for sharing a situated praxis of slow, creative coproduction across micro, meso and macro policy terrains within the landscape of relationships and sexuality education in Wales. Through spoken word, film and image, I explore how posthuman, artful methodologies have the potential to reconfigure policy texts as dartaphacts (arts‑activist objects), translating policy into eventful, response‑able resources to make policy matter otherwise.

Bio

EJ Renold is Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University. Their research investigates how gender and sexuality, in all their human and more-than-human diversity, come to matter in children and young people’s everyday lives across diverse sites, spaces and locales. Here, they have explored the affordances of how creative, coproduced methods, resources and events can engage micro and macro political change with young people, teachers, youth workers, educators, health professionals, policy-makers and politicians (see agendaonline.co.uk). EJ was the winner of the UK’s ESRC Impact in Society Prize (2018), the Huw Owen Medal for Outstanding Educational Research in Wales (2021) and received the American Education Research Association’s Critical Posthuman and Postfoundational SIG’s Collaborative Excellence award in 2025. Their forthcoming edited collection (with Huuki, Pihkala and Taylor) Creative Research on Gender and Sexuality with Children and Young People: Making Methods Matter (Routledge) will be published in summer 2026.

Dr Sid Mohandas

Dr Sid Mohandas is a Montessori practitioner and childhood studies scholar, whose research in early childhood employs feminist, decolonial, anticolonial and more-than-human approaches. Sid has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and edited book collections. They are the author of the Bloomsbury Academic book Re-imagining Gender in the Early Childhood Workforce: Feminist and More-than-human Perspectives. More recently Sid co-edited the Special Issue on ‘Bewildering early childhood pioneers’ in the journal Pedagogy, Culture and Society, and is currently the co-editor for a Special Issue in British Education Research Journal titled ‘The state of gender(s), young people and education: inequities, inter/intrasectionality and inclusivity’. Sid also serves as an editorial board member for the journal Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology.

More PGRSC 2026 announcements to follow.

Submit your papers

Submit your proposed papers through:  CMT supported PGRSC2026 submission site.

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

• Call for papers (PDF)
• Poster Instructions (PDF)

Looking forward to seeing you all at the conference and if you have any questions, please do contact the conference chairs or summerconference@mdx.ac.uk for more information.

Book your place