This page provides context rather than authority — a way of understanding how I approach research and the environments that shape it.
My research and academic work provide the context within which my mentoring practice has developed.
I completed my PhD in 2021 and have worked closely with research students and academic staff in UK higher education across a range of roles, including research, postgraduate education, and researcher development.
My academic background is in psychology, with a particular focus on qualitative research and the study of lived experience.
Across this work, my attention has consistently been drawn to how people experience research environments, institutional expectations, and their own identities as researchers — particularly in contexts marked by uncertainty, transition, or uneven access to unspoken academic norms.
Rather than seeing research as a purely technical or procedural activity, my academic work has focused on research as a social and emotional practice: something that unfolds over time and is shaped by relationships, power, belonging, and everyday life.
Research focus and interests
Across my research work, I’ve been consistently interested in how people make sense of experience in contexts shaped by identity, power, and collective life — particularly where those experiences are emotionally complex, socially situated, or not easily articulated.
My doctoral research examined collective and group based emotion at political protests, focusing on how people experience, express, and understand shared emotional states in public and politicised spaces.
This work was less about events themselves and more about how meaning is formed through participation, belonging, and dissent.
In postdoctoral research, I worked on a project exploring intergenerational connections within the LGBTQ+ community.
That work centred on relationships, identity, and continuity across generations, and on how people negotiate difference, history, and change within communities that have often had to create their own forms of support and understanding.
Alongside this, my work in researcher development has involved examining institutional experiences that are often taken for granted or left unspoken — most notably the period following the PhD viva.
Through interviews and evaluative research, this work highlighted both the need for reflective support at moments of transition and the ways in which existing structures frequently assume resilience, confidence, or self direction without acknowledging how unevenly these are distributed.
Across different contexts, what connects this work is attentiveness to lived experience and to what becomes possible when there is space to think things through rather than having to arrive at answers quickly.
Working within research culture
I didn’t expect to find myself in research environments at all, and coming into academia later in life has shaped how I notice the assumptions and expectations that often sit beneath them.
Being in these positions has meant watching, up close, how research cultures actually operate — not just in principle, but in practice.
I’ve seen how policies, procedures, timelines, and institutional expectations shape what researchers are asked to do, and how responsibility and accountability are distributed in ways that are not always visible to those moving through them.
What has stood out most to me is how much is assumed.
At key points in the research journey — particularly around transition, assessment, or change — there is often an expectation that researchers will know how to respond, how to move forward, or how to regain momentum, even when very little space exists to talk through what that navigation involves.
Working within research culture
My academic work has been shared through a mixture of peer reviewed publications, doctoral research, conference presentations, and applied research outputs.
The examples below are included to give a sense of the kinds of questions, approaches, and contexts that have shaped how I think about research and research cultures.
Peer reviewed publications
- Day, C. & Sullivan, G. (forthcoming). “‘Remoaners’ last laugh?: Intelligent humour enacts positive ingroup characteristics and alleviates group based anger.” British Journal of Social Psychology.
- Day, C. (2022). “The Rainbow Connection: Disrupting background affect, overcoming barriers and emergent emotional collectives at ‘Pride in London’.” British Journal of Sociology.
- Messick, K., Aranda, B., & Day, C. (2020). “The experiences of metal fans with mental and developmental disorders in the metal music community.” Metal Music Studies.
- Day, C. & Nicholls, K. (2019). “‘They Don’t Think Like Us’: Exploring attitudes of non transgender students toward transgender people using discourse analysis.” Journal of Homosexuality.
- Sullivan, G. & Day, C. (2019). “Collective emotions in celebratory, competitive, and conflictual contexts.” Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 3, 202–222.
Doctoral research
- Day, C. (2021). Investigating the role of group based and collective emotion at social justice events. PhD thesis, Coventry University.
Conferences and knowledge exchange (selected)
- “Being stripped of the subversive.” European Conference on Politics and Gender (2024)
- “‘Remoaners’ last laugh?: Intelligent humour and group based emotion.” Festival of Psychology (2023)
- “Post viva support in UK HEIs.” UKCGE International Conference on PGR Mental Health & Wellbeing (2022)
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