Fellow In Focus: Dr Alison Wood

Dr Alison Wood’s career encompassed music, medicine, English, divinity and history, before she brought them all together to lead Homerton’s unique Changemakers programme. She tells us why she loves seeing how different disciplines collide, and how Changemakers works to inspire students.

Alison explained the Changemakers programme to His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales on his visit last November

You’ve had an extraordinarily wideranging career! How does it all fit together?

I find it hard to fit myself into a 150-word bio. My career has had many turns that look unconventional, but in hindsight there have been two consistent threads.

I’ve always been inter-disciplinary, thinking about how different disciplines work together, where the edges are, and how they can collide. And I’ve always been interested in institution-building: how we build better structures to enable even better thinking and action.

What was your starting point?

I studied English and History at the University of Adelaide, before working as a musician for ten years, teaching piano and singing, and playing professionally, while also undertaking further studies in music. Then, while I was writing my Research MA in English on libretti, I also worked in medicine, co-ordinating a multi-disciplinary Healthy Aging Research Cluster at the University of Adelaide. I could talk, write and organise, and they wanted someone who wasn’t necessarily from a medical background, but who could think creatively and build organisational structure. We built a network of 100+ researchers from across the University, won a second round of operating costs, and won several large research grants as a result of that crossdisciplinary cooperation.

It was superbly interesting, and I learned so much about how institutional power operates, and how different disciplines can speak to each other.

What brought you to the UK?

I had a yearning to come to the UK to study. King’s College London was offering its first programmes in literature and medicine, and I was initially planning to write on 19th century Jewish texts, a plan which fell apart when my supervisor asked “how’s your Yiddish?”

Instead, I looked into TRR Stebbing, an English evangelical Christian who read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, converted to Darwinism, and became one

of the world’s leading taxonomists of small crustacea. He also founded natural history societies around the country and advocated for thoughtful science for everyone. My PhD was on how ideas - in this case evolutionary theory – become normal and how intellectual institutions contribute to that process.

You’ve now been in the UK over a decade…

Yes! I only intended to stay four years, but I was constantly building things, from research seminars and networks to programmes to help graduate students think about the richness of their skillset and how that could be intelligently applied within universities and beyond. I was frustrated by the narrowness of some academic structures, which seemed utterly inadequate renderings of what universities really do and can do.

A postdoc position came up at Cambridge spanning Divinity and English, exploring the relationship between the roots of Cambridge University and ideas of the modern research university. The experience confirmed my deep interest in how universities function. It also showed me I loved being in Cambridge for the possibilities it offered – the questions I could ask and the resources I could use to answer them.

CRASSH (The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) then advertised an interdisciplinary Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, described at the time as one of the most prestigious fellowships in Cambridge. I pitched a project on existential doubt in English 19th century thought, and then realised I really wanted to continue thinking about universities. And I became very interested in the ways researchers felt they were being funnelled into paths that seemed restrictive. As a postdoc at that time you were neither staff nor student. Postdocs have so much potential and yet they’re often told that they’ve failed unless they get to the next academic stage. I joined University committees agitating for rethinking our mission on how we see researchers and how they see themselves. I wanted postdocs to feel poised to do extraordinary things.

I also became even more interested in how public discourse around universities has changed, and at the same time aware of my discontent that universities no longer seemed to be seedhouses for social You joined Homerton in 2018 to run the brand-new Changemakers programme. How much of it was already formed, and how much did you create from scratch?

I was at a CRASSH for five years, including two maternity leaves, and then found myself in a wonderful, random conversation about a programme taking root at Homerton, a College I confess I knew nothing about. At that stage Changemakers was a two-page document, and Homerton was looking for someone to turn it into a living entity.

I gave a 10-minute presentation, in which I found myself weaving in everything from doubt to whole system thriving and learning what not to change! I had become more and more committed to the idea of holistic living, bringing together the pleasures of the arts and concerns about the climate crisis for example – it seemed wrong that we were separating out all the elements of being human, and I felt that it was breaking us.

The idea of Changemakers was already formed, as an extra-curricular programme based on Leadership, Resilience, Enterprise and Responsibility, but it needed to be built. I spent a year living with the idea and working out what would best engage students. The first residential in 2018 was a baptism of fire, with 60 students taking part over a full week.

How has the concept evolved since then?

We were hugely fortunate to be able to bring Dr Soraya Jones onto the team, who’s contributed to everything from the intellectual vision to stuffing envelopes. And we have an amazing Steering Group comprised of mostly Homerton Fellows. In four years, a network of almost 200 champions and mentors has also grown, and we’re hugely grateful for the time and energy they give. During the pandemic we did a lot of pivoting, from creating our ‘Mentoring in Pandemic Times’ programme to hosting virtual residentials and teaching everything online.

Changemakers is a bit like me – it can be hard to define in 150 words. It’s a programme equipping students to be wise agents of change in a complex world. It’s modular and co-curricular, sitting alongside a student’s degree, and open to anyone at Homerton. When our students engage with it, they tell us it’s transformative. It taps into a longing we all have to answer the question “what is my purpose in my life?”. It touches on very large existential questions, but also very pragmatic things: being a lever for change; starting a social innovation; ethical leadership; creating sustainable systems. It pushes people to see that the rules aren’t set in stone. It’s starting to be recognised globally as a new way of thinking about education.

It’s also become central to Homerton. Changemakers was a significant element of the College’s distinctiveness the candidates for Principal picked up on, and in the last round of Junior Research Fellowships most applicants mentioned it. Every fresher now encounters Changemakers as part of their earliest introduction to the College. It’s shaping Homerton culture.

To what extent do you think Changemakers could only have happened at Homerton?

We’re the only Oxbridge College to run a programme like this at this scale. Homerton has a progressive, socially-minded strand of its DNA, and was willing to invest in it.

The College environment is ready-made for inter-disciplinary encounters, and I love working with people from other disciplines and building something meaningful together. We’re all the product of endless decisions and encounters.

Changemakers can embody fit-forpurpose education and inspire beyond our current parameters. It’s genuinely exciting beyond universities – it’s capturing a global movement which says that the old ways of doing things are not enough and that we must evolve. I find it intoxicating.

Changemakers has given me a new voice. It doesn’t tell students what a better world could be, but uses advanced pedagogy to help them work out their own answers. I feel extremely lucky that my life path is the perfect background for this. I’ve worked in eight different disciplines, and on the surface that looks a bit diffuse and disconnected. But I’ve always been engaged in creating new formats for brilliant people to think together more effectively. It’s an extraordinary privilege to be doing this at Homerton.