Dr Thekla Anastasiou

I am a Lecturer in Early Years and Childhood Studies and currently, I am teaching on Undergraduate Units. I have a Master’s degree in Educational Leadership and School Improvement as well as in Educational Research from The University of Manchester. During the last two years of my Ph.D. at the Manchester Metropolitan University, I also gained experience of working as an Associate Lecturer at the MMU teaching Units in level 4, 5 and 6.

I started my teaching career being engaged in a range of teaching activities at several community schools in the Greater Manchester area and Stoke-on-Trent where not only knowledge around the language was important but also the need to build and keep a Greek community was essential. Also, I was delivering private lessons (Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Latin, History) to small groups of students or one to one for two years in Cyprus.

My Ph.D. research draws on young children’s embodied engagements with food and aims to augment knowledge around food and eating. The study is based in a nursery in an area of Manchester, England, known to have high levels of poverty and offers free places to ‘disadvantaged’ two-year-olds. Moving away from more familiar narratives of healthy eating and promoting a balanced diet in the early years, this research closely examines powerful stories around food, which are usually silenced or overlooked by practitioners or/and the researchers. Drawing from Actor Network Theory, New Materialisms (NM) and Post-humanism, this research examines how post-humanities offer new opportunities, as well as produce particular challenges, in relation to ways of ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ in research that emerges from post-qualitative inquiry (Lather and St Pierre, 2013). From this research, a different perspective on young children’s relationships with food emerges, when examining the ways events are produced in and from the relations between subjects and objects in non-stable environments.

Academic and professional qualifications

BA Classic Studies and Philosophy (The University of Cyprus, 2005-2009)

MSc Human Resource Management and International Development (The University of Manchester, 2009-2010)

MA Educational Leadership and School Improvement (The University of Manchester, 2010-2011)

MSc Educational Research (The University of Manchester, 2011-2012)

Ph.D. in Education (Manchester Metropolitan University, 2014-2017)

Languages

Greek

English