There are over 40 national elections planned over the course of 2024, with the aggregate population of these nations amounting to approximately 40% of the total global population. In turn, policymakers’ concerns about matters of mis/disinformation and extremism are as high as they have ever been. Wilson's impact project will collaborate with key stakeholders – government, industry, and the third sector – to work towards improving their understanding of how people seek out and actively generate disinformation.

There is an abundance of work from psychology examining the nature and causes of disinformation and conspiracy theory. The weakness of these approaches is that they focus on subjects’ interpretation of information, and ignore the practices through which people seek out and actively generate disinformation. QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theorist movement that has become an extremely influential generator of mis/disinformation on politics and health. Following QAnon believer’s claims as to the importance of doing ‘your own research,’ Wilson’s PhD project was concerned with how ‘research’ is understood and performed within the movement. The study demonstrated that the process of doing ‘research’ is a neglected site of potential intervention in a person’s becoming a QAnon believer and represents an opportunity for impact in efforts to counter mis/disinformation and radicalisation.

Project activities will involve: a secondment at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue; holding a workshop for activists, journalists, and non-academic extremism researchers to equip them to better address mis/disinformation; and contributing a counter-mis/disinformation module to the Digital Health and Rights Project’s Digital Empowerment Hub.

The promotion of educational inclusion and equity in schools continues to be an international priority for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers. Amidst a deepening crisis in the English special educational needs system, the effective deployment of teaching assistants has been shown to be an integral component in the achievement of educational inclusion within the classroom. However, recent policy frameworks on teacher induction in England have underestimated the challenge early career teachers face in deploying teaching assistants for educational inclusion, and are not sufficiently sensitive to the specific career-stage factors which shape this work.

Working collaboratively with Dr Rob Webster (creator of the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants), the TA Network Hub, and the University of Cambridge Primary School, this project will address this challenge by:

1. Working with preservice teachers, early career teachers and teaching assistants to develop targeted training and support that facilitates equitable and inclusive approaches to teaching assistant deployment in the primary classroom.
2. Developing awareness amongst primary school staff and initial teacher educators of the challenges associated with deploying teaching assistants to strengthen preservice education and early career induction support.