Alison is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Australia, and a school-based member at the Institute for Culture and Society. She is a committed educator and researcher who places the student experience at the heart of her approach. With over 20 years’ in higher education she has held positions at several institutions in the UK and has extensive experience of program leadership, curriculum design and development, and management of staff teams and budgets. Alison has held several governance roles during my career, including DAP roles at three institutions and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Alison’s research focuses on the differing roles graphic design can play in the mediation, construction and communication of everyday life, belonging and identity. This enables her to draw together a range of different contexts in which graphic design is a key vehicle for the negotiation and construction of place.
Alison often uses creative methods to understand and represent everyday life and place in urban contexts and has developed innovative interdisciplinary geo/graphic methodologies drawing on graphic design, cultural geography and anthropology. She has also explored forms of 'deep mapping' through the creative use of text and image which push at the boundaries of traditional academic publishing.
Alison's current research focus centres on the concept of ‘graphic heritage’, which can be defined as any object through which we experience or are informed about heritage in graphic form. Such a broad definition can therefore be extended to contexts beyond formally managed and designed heritage sites and enables a nuanced understanding of ways communities reflect their differing heritages in their making of place.
Alison published the research monograph Creative Representations of Place with Routledge in 2019 and is currently contracted to write her second book with Routledge, Urban Graphic Heritage: People, Politics & Place. She also is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in the UK.
- Between 1998–2005 Alison held a senior lecturer position at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
- In 2007 she was promoted to Principal Lecturer and Programme Leader of BA(Hons) Graphic Design.
- In 2012, she took up a lecturer role on B Design (Visual Communication at Western Sydney University, and was promoted to Director of Academic Program in 2014.
- In 2015 she returned to the UK to take up a Senior Lecturer and Program Leader role at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London where she established a new undergraduate degree program—BA(Hons) Graphic Branding & Identity.
- In 2019 she moved to Loughbrough University as a Lecturer on BA(Hons) Graphics & Illustration before returning to Western Sydney in 2021.