YorkTalks 2025

Engineering equitable outcomes: a collaborative laboratory of all the talents is reimagining technology development to address the drivers of inequality. Professor Jonathan Ensor, the Equitable Technology Lab.

The Equitable Technology Lab (ETL) is a two-year experiment funded through the University’s Sparks programme and draws heavily on Professor Ensor's experience as a former engineer, international development practitioner, and academic to pioneer a very different way of thinking about and doing engineering. 

In this talk, Jonathan reveals how, by engaging wider stakeholders in the process of designing technology, we can develop technical ‘hardware’ alongside the social and organisational ‘software’ that wrap around it, to deliver solutions that are more appropriate for their context and more equitable in how benefits are experienced. 

This different way of thinking means we need to appreciate that engineering challenges are social as well as technical, and to understand that engineering itself is an ethical as well as a practical endeavour. Through projects ranging from the waters off the Yorkshire coast, to the islands of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, he shows how combining excellence in engineering science with the critical social sciences is not only producing equitable outcomes, but also scientists and engineers who understand that the way in which they do science matters for society. As a result, the transdisciplinary approach of the ETL is not only delivering impact through equitable, socio-technical solutions, it is also establishing a new field of applied academic research.

Greener pathways to mental health: harnessing nature to improve well-being, build resilient communities, and promote sustainability. Professor Peter Coventry, Department of Health Sciences.

The NHS decarbonisation plan - delivering a net zero NHS - has the bold ambition to achieve net zero for the emissions our health service directly controls by 2040 and for those it influences by 2045.

Beyond the obvious direct interventions within NHS estates and facilities, travel and transport, supply chain and medicines, Professor Peter Coventry offers a compelling case for how nature-based interventions can enhance mental well-being, foster community resilience, and contribute to health and environmental co-benefits that align with net zero ambitions.

Drawing on a diverse range of studies, from outdoor heritage crafting to a large-scale evaluation of green social prescribing across Humber and North Yorkshire, Professor Coventry illustrates the profound potential of nature-based solutions for mental health. These interventions provide more than just mental health benefits – they create opportunities for connection, meaning, and sustainability.

Original copies: the facsimile before photography. Dr Jane Raisch, Department of English and Related Literature.

Expect a high-energy ride through the ancestry of books and bookmaking that feels as much detective story as history. Dr Raisch uncovers the origins, evolution and hidden signals behind the production of facsimiles, from a fifth-century manuscript of Virgil’s poetry to modern times. Her forensic approach explores the development of techniques and technologies for creating copies that begin with the creative craft of hand written manuscripts and end with the camera phone. 

In a journey that transports us from manuscript to print, from the intellectual powerhouse of eighteenth-century Florence to the modern day office, she reveals how ‘hybrid’ forms of copying emerged combining various reproductive techniques that ultimately resulted in the ability to reproduce complete works.

Digging deeper into the creation of facsimiles, she invites us to question what is original and what is copy and how the mechanics of production and reproduction change the way we think about books. In doing so, she places the reader in the role of active participant arguing that early printed facsimiles teach us how to read them and how to read between the lines.

Housework is good for you. Housework sparks joy. Housework is glamorous. Housework is key to a happy family. Housework shows that you care. Housework is women’s work. Dr Emma Casey, Department of Sociology.

Popular depictions of housework as ‘sparking joy’; as the preserve of the ‘happy housewife’; as key to a happy family; as an expression of ‘care’; and as ‘women’s work’, have a long and stubborn history.

Today, digital social media is flooded with images of gleaming, immaculately tidy homes with accounts dedicated to reproducing images of women cleaning, tidying and ordering domestic spaces omnipresent across social media. The influencer boon, alongside a renewed post-pandemic focus on keeping homes clean, germ-free and ‘safe’, has culminated in the burgeoning popularity of ‘cleanfluencing’; an online re-configuration of the white woman housewife, responsible for curating digital images of the perfect home and with overwhelmingly women followers. 

And yet housework remains one of the most unequal institutions globally. Women, especially poorer women, and women of colour continue to do most of the low-paid and unpaid domestic labour. Dr Casey reveals why these inequalities matter and why they persist. In doing so, she offers a call to challenge the prevailing myths around housework and the ‘naturally competent’ woman homemaker.

Author of the upcoming book, The Return of the Housewife: Why Women are Still Cleaning Up, Dr Casey explores what happens when the false promise of ‘domestic bliss’ and neoliberal striving towards self-realisation via housework, is combined with the meteoric and unbridled success of social media. She uncovers how  the onslaught of heavily commercialised social media content, saturated with images of women as competent, content and happy homemakers has become central to the recent digital self-care and positive thinking movement.

Honey, I shrunk the needle: how thinking small is creating non-invasive diagnostic tools that will have a massive impact on the early detection of disease. Professor Tarl Prow, Hull York Medical School.

From a very early age, Professor Tarl Prow thought small. With an oncologist for a mother and a father who explores the interfaces between computer hardware and software, he likes to think he ended up ‘somewhere in between’. Today he is a blend of innovative entrepreneur and medical researcher working at the intersection of dermatology, nanotechnology and molecular biology.

His talk is a voyage of discovery that traverses the world from Texas and Baltimore to York via Melbourne Australia, and a career in medical research spanning the delivery of genes to white blood cells to help astronauts cope with ionizing radiation in space, to deploying nanoparticles to the eyes of diabetic animals to stop diabetic retinopathy and prevent diabetic blindness.

The latter work provoked an epiphany and a career pivot from the frontiers of fundamental science to an applied R&D world of invention that brings much more immediate health benefits. This resulted in the production of a non-invasive ‘needle’ that can take skin samples from a baby and not wake it from sleep and, here in York, the development of ‘digital twins’ where clinical experiments can be carried out in the virtual world using AI and machine learning to deliver with measurable results that advance the cause of human health and wellbeing. 

Finding YorVoice: how interdisciplinary research is revealing the uniqueness of the human voice. Dr Vince Hughes, Department of Language and Linguistic Science.

Your voice is unique. It contains rich information about where you grew up, your social and educational background, your age, your sex and gender, as well as short-term factors, such as how you feel towards a person or topic, the time of day, and any illness you might have.

The unique properties of your voice are determined by a combination of your anatomy and physiology, as well as the set of life experiences that make you, you. In recent years, there has been a huge increase in AI-based speech technologies, allowing us to transcribe speech and singing in real time, recognise your voice to allow you access to your bank account, and even to create deepfake versions of your voice saying words that you never said. 

In this talk, Dr Hughes shows that such systems are often limited by focusing on ‘average’ voices, meaning that many people are left behind. Dr Hughes is lead figure in the YorVoice project, funded as part of the University’s SPARKS programme, which is a two-year research endeavour that brings together researchers from across all three faculties to address important and timely questions related to the uniqueness of the human voice.

In this talk, he will reveal the range of interdisciplinary voice research happening at York as part of YorVoice; from the development of legal frameworks to protect ownership over a voice, to interventions to make performers sound more like themselves, to themselves. In bringing together different skills and perspectives, YorVoice is transforming the way impactful voice research is done.

A Bolivian prison journey: Breaking down the barriers to sustainable mental healthcare in Latin America’s highly populated prisons. Dr Anne Aboaja, Health Sciences.

Consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Anne Aboaja is a global citizen who has worked in some of the world’s most challenging environments in a quest to deliver better mental healthcare – including overcrowded prisons in South America. In this talk she shares her exhilarating journey from identifying the mental health development needs in Bolivian prisons to building a collaboration of like-minded researchers capable of challenging the status quo at every level. 

Drawing on her experiences, Dr Aboaja reveals how, layer by layer, she stubbornly chipped away at the obstacles to reform from the outside-in. By breaking down the old, narrow ways of measuring success in research papers, she co-authored a key report that is having real impact on prison policy (the outer layer). Her work in creating a network of psychiatrists that could collectively chip away at the middle layer of the prison mental healthcare ecosystem revealed how to build mental healthcare capacity and capability in the prisons (the middle layer). By convening a workshop with prisoners and practitioners to identify research priorities; raise awareness of signs of mental health conditions; and provide the lay skills in managing mental health distress (the inner layer), she is overturning common conceptions of people living inside highly populated South American prisons. 

Reflecting on this remarkable journey, she identifies collaboration, determination and innovation as being necessary ingredients for compassion-driven researchers to address the global mental health challenges facing people living in underserved prisons. These qualities, Dr Aboaja believes, have relevance to the wider world and to the UK where she heads a team in the low secure mental health service at Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust.

For centuries we’ve been trying to zap ourselves into better health using electricity. Luigi Galvani’s experiments to make frogs’ legs twitch in the 1780s catalysed investigations into the electricity present inside living things and the effects it has on the body. The following century witnessed  a proliferation of new machines, claiming to do everything from healing wounds to curing cancer.
 
While many of these machines were dismissed as ‘quackery’, electrical stimulation is still routinely used in healthcare today. And centuries more research has helped us understand better how electrical currents and fields emerge inside the body – and, coincidentally, how these processes are disrupted in wounds and cancer.
 
Today, electrical stimulators such as pacemakers are routinely used in clinical settings to help treat various conditions and companies continue to develop new electroceutical (electronic pharmaceutical) treatments. At the same time, recent research suggests that modulating bioelectrical signals can influence fundamental behaviours, such as the ability of organs to regenerate.
 
In this talk, Stuart will explore his obsession with living things and electricity. He’ll describe contemporary efforts in electrical healing, and the ongoing fundamental research into bioelectricity. He’ll also reflect on his own recent scientific journey into this area, as a scientist attempting to build both a team and a lab to rigorously study bioelectrical phenomena. And he’ll describe how this fascination is also his fear – is he just the latest scientist to become enthralled by the possible healing power of electricity?

Building bridges not barriers: constructing an education system in Ghana capable of integrating a migrant population comprising 500 languages in a country with 80 different languages of its own. Dr Daniel Kyereko, Department of Education.

Contrary to popular western misperceptions that migrants in West Africa are mostly heading towards Europe, Dr Kyereko shows that 84% of this incredibly diverse migration happens across Africa itself: specifically the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

Established in 1975, along with the free movement of people, the numbers migrating across the ECOWAS region may have declined in recent years, but, as Daniel reveals, destination countries such as Ghana continue to face major challenges in creating an education system capable of meeting the needs and aspirations of these diverse language groups and communities and the ambitions of the host economy. 

Drawing on his work for the 2019 Global Education Monitoring Report and UNESCO, he discovers a school system that struggles to adapt its teaching methods to accommodate the unique needs of migrant students. The reliance on rigid and standardised teaching methods, often unsuitable for linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms, highlights systemic shortcomings rather than individual teacher failures.

This lack of adaptability results in the exclusion or marginalisation of a migrant population that is already at risk of becoming ‘invisible’ within the education system. In this talk, he identifies pockets of best practice and points the way towards much-needed systemic reforms that prioritise inclusivity and flexibility in teaching approaches.

Home truths: how Colombo’s marginalised communities are creating their own vision of a world class city for South Asia. Dr Asha Abeyasekera, Centre for Women’s Studies.

As Sri Lanka’s capital city Colombo embarks on the next phase of its transformation into a ‘world class city’ for South Asia, Dr Abeyasekera reports from the frontline of a grass roots movement, led largely by women, that is challenging the miliary-led displacement of diverse communities who have a long and rich history in the city. 

Her research focuses on a threatened working-class neighbourhood in Colombo and records how women are disproportionately bearing the burden of eviction and relocation through their homemaking and the care.  As part of a major multi-country study, which includes Mumbai and Lahore, Dr Abeyasekera's work is an inspiring account of research that is helping create an alternative, more equitable vision for a city that values and respects the contribution these women and their communities make to a vibrant and inclusive future for Colombo.  

The talk also highlights Dr Abeyasekera's collaboration with a female film maker in Colombo that resulted in a powerful documentary – a short extract from which will be shown - raising awareness of an issue that affects more than 130 million people across South Asia’s fast-growing cities aspiring to world class status. 

From breaking ice to breaking boundaries: developing new approaches to teaching to equip the next generation of sustainability change-makers. Professor Claire Hughes, Department of Environment and Geography.

As a marine scientist, Professor Claire Hughes spent the early years of her academic career investigating the fundamental processes that link seawater biology and atmospheric chemistry in the ice-cold landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctica. After a decade of seeing the positive impact of effective teaching on students and realising the important role universities need to play in equipping graduates with the skills and competencies to tackle global sustainability challenges, Professor Hughes left behind marine science to focus on teaching leadership.

At YorkTalks, Professor Hughes will talk about the national award-winning initiatives she has led which ensure all York students can learn about and work on sustainability challenges, including as a founding member of Environmental Sustainability at York (ESAY). The talk will include an introduction to the University of York Sustainability Clinic through which, as part of a credit-bearing module, students work together in multi-disciplinary teams to support community groups, charities and SMEs to achieve their sustainability goals. She will also discuss the importance of breaking down academic silos for delivering effective sustainability education, and the crucial role Universities need to play in the green workforce transformation.

Spheres of ownership: Selling our body parts or consenting to slavery, the limits of self-ownership and property rights. Dr Hannah Carnegy-Arbuthnott, Department of Philosophy.

Do we own ourselves? Philosopher Dr Hannah Carnegy-Arbuthnott explores how the rights we have over our bodies take the same form as property rights. Just as others may not interfere with our property without our consent; the same goes for our bodies. This concept of self-ownership is meant to secure the idea that each person has the exclusive right to make decisions about herself and her body, without interference from others. But does it? 

In this talk, Dr Carnegy-Arbuthnott tests the limits of self-ownership. Would they include personal data and intellectual output? If I own myself does that mean I can sell any of my body parts, including my kidney? Might I even sell myself into slavery? Navigating these often politically turbulent waters, she challenges the claim that self-ownership properly captures the moral importance of persons and shows how her research is shedding light on difficult debates about the limits of what we can do with our bodies, as well as explaining why we ought to treat some objects of property as more personal than others.

In the final session, we break with YorkTalks tradition to host a high-energy round table event, chaired by Jennifer Williams of the Financial Times and joined by Andy Kerr, incoming Director of Economy for the York & North Yorkshire Combined Authority. It will explore the role of the University’s research as a force for innovation and economic growth in the Yorkshire region.