Please browse the ‘Associates‘ and ‘People‘ pages to find out about some of those who work on our projects. If you or your organisation is interested in developing an idea or project which we could help you with please get in touch by emailing Brendan Stone or David Forrest.
Brendan Stone is Professor of Social Engagement and the Humanities at The University of Sheffield and the founder and director of the Storying Sheffield project. Brendan has expertise in using narrative methodologies to understand complex human and social issues, and he has worked extensively with socially excluded individuals and groups. He has research, teaching, and public engagement interests in narrative, identity, and trauma; mental distress and ‘recovery’; and engaged pedagogies. He has worked in partnership with many organisations including NHS Trusts, businesses, social enterprises, and local government.
Brendan is the University of Sheffield’s Deputy Vice-President for Education, which entails working on the development and implementation of strategy for all aspects of learning and teaching in the institution, and the leadership and oversight of various activities and priorities. Prior to this, he was the ‘cross-cutting’ Director of Learning and Teaching for the University, working on the ‘Outward-Facing’ agenda, which includes ‘Engaged Learning‘. He is also a Director of Sheffield Flourish, a mental health charity which frequently works with Universities and the NHS. He is a member of Medical Humanities Sheffield, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Mental Health, a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Senate Fellowship Award winner at the University of Sheffield. In 2017 Brendan won the Academic and Health Science Network’s Excellence in Patient Experience award for his work with people living with mental illness.
David Forrest is Lecturer in Film at the University of Sheffield, and a co-director of the Storying Sheffield project. David’s main research area is British social realist cinema, with a particular interest in the functions of space, place and landscape in realist texts. He is experienced in developing forms of socially engaged approaches to research and teaching in film studies, and developed the ‘Sheffield Film Studies and Sheffield Studies Film’ project, which involved local school children in analysing visual representations of Sheffield, before creating their own films of their lives in the city. He also led the Youzi project which used film and photography to explore the everyday lives of Chinese students in Sheffield. His work is currently focussed on the film and television writer and novelist Barry Hines, perhaps best known for the novel A Kestrel for a Knave and the TV play Threads. He is also undertaking a number of projects on the representation of the North of England in film and television drama.