Dr Amalia Sabiescu
Lecturer in Media and Creative Industries and UKRI Innovation Fellow, AHRC Early Career Research Leadership
Amalia is a media and communications scholar specialising in the study of information technology adoption and influences in cultural and creative practice, international and community development.
In 2019, she was awarded a UKRI Innovation Fellowship – through the AHRC Leadership Fellows ECR Scheme – to explore new ways to align community, cultural and creative resources with young people’s professional development needs.
Exploring new ways to mobilise community, cultural and creative resources to provide skills development and lifelong learning opportunities for the digital generation.
The job market is changing, and we all need to keep up with an evolving workplace. To ensure that young people are ready to meet its emerging demands, we need new approaches to training and development.
In collaboration with a range of cultural, non-profit and academic partners, I am developing a new model for skills development outside formal education which has young people’s aspirations at its heart.
My research addresses how we connect cultural and community organisations and resources to support young people’s professional aspirations and goals. We know that young people’s professional choices are not influenced only by the school, but by complex and not always coherent webs of information, interactions and practices online and offline, in local and interest-based communities, and out of school activities.
My partners include the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the charities The Roma Project and Coventry Boys and Girls Club in Coventry and the multidisciplinary team from the Centre of Excellence in Media Practice at Bournemouth University.
We are investigating how young people develop their interests and aspirations, and how these connect with information and communication practices carried out on- and offline – in youth clubs, sports, community and cultural spaces.
This understanding will be used to generate insights on entry points and intervention areas that can be taken up by community, non-profit and cultural sector organisations to better target and improve the relevance of their programmes for young people.
We will also formulate recommendations on cooperation structures between cultural, community and educational institutions so that they can respond to – and align their information and communication practices with – young people's training needs and aspirations.
I hope my work will influence the agendas of cultural and community institutions – and make a difference for younger people, especially those who are marginalised and disadvantaged.
Securing the Fellowship has given me this invaluable opportunity to create a better understanding of how young people’s social interactions and engagement with communication media and technologies can be used to support this new approach.
More importantly, it will allow us to apply our findings to address sectoral needs in the UK, and shape new research agendas that bring communication and media studies in dialogue with cultural studies and education for socially and policy relevant research.
My research journey
After completing my PhD in Communication Sciences at the University of Lugano in Switzerland, I held postdoctoral research positions at institutions across Europe and in Australia. My work explored the social and cultural factors in the appropriation and use of communication technologies in relation to issues of citizen voice, participation and social inclusion.
I joined º¬Ðß²ÝÊÓƵ London in 2016, initially as a Research Associate and am now delighted to hold the post of Lecturer in Media and Creative Industries.
