For the second time, the SPA is operating a grant scheme specifically aimed at Early Career Researchers (ECRs). This scheme is dedicated to the facilitation of research.
Its aim is to create space for ECR SPA members to sustain their research momentum and secure concrete achievements at a stage in their career when these things can be especially challenging, due to other pressures and demands, and an increasingly competitive research funding environment.
It offers funds of up to £1000, with the possibility of follow-up funding in subsequent rounds. Grants received should be spent in the period September 2026-July 2027.
We anticipate that this scheme will run again in similar form in the summer of 2027.
SPA CAREER LAUNCH GRANT HOLDERS 2026/27
[Additional profiles of grant holders to be added]
Penelope Laycock
I am a Social Policy researcher and lecturer at the University of Glasgow, specialising in social policy, inequality, trauma-informed practice and evidence-informed approaches to education and public policy. I hold a PhD in Social Policy, alongside qualifications in Medical Anthropology and Biological Anthropology. My doctoral research explored the experiences of adult children of alcoholics growing up in Glasgow using a socioecological approach.
My current research examines how teaching and learning practices in higher education can be adapted to become more trauma-informed across the curriculum, rather than only when teaching sensitive subjects. I am exploring how pedagogical approaches can support psychologically safer, inclusive learning environments. Following interviews with academic staff, I am currently conducting student focus groups to examine experiences and perspectives on trauma-informed teaching and learning. The research will inform an evidence-informed framework and practical toolkit for trauma-informed higher education.
Sha (Lisa) Li
Dr Sha (Lisa) Li is a Social Science Tutor at the University of Bath International Study Centre and an early-career researcher working across social policy and sociology. Her research interests include family and social relationships, intergenerational care, ageing and social change. Her doctoral research at the University of Bath explored urban Chinese young adults’ expectations of caring for older family members and the implications for family life, employment and long-term care policy.
Her current project examines Relationship Security and Relationship Recession in the digital era and their implications for well-being, inequality and social policy. Through an interdisciplinary scoping review, two student workshops, two academic seminars and an international webinar, the project will develop a conceptual framework for understanding changing social relationships, guide future empirical research and support discussion of appropriate policy responses.
Yunyan Li
Dr Yunyan Li is an ESRC-funded Research Associate at the University of Leicester, currently working on a sector-wide study of institutional responses to harassment and targeted hostility in higher education. Her research examines how institutions meant to provide care and support, such as welfare systems, families, workplaces and universities, can instead produce and (re-)distribute harm and exclusion, and what justice and human need require of them in response.
Supported by the Social Policy Association Career-Launch Research Grant, Yunyan is leading a one-year exploratory study, Move to thrive: Co-creating mobility justice for human needs, which brings human needs approaches into dialogue with mobility justice and participatory governance to ask whose mobility needs are recognised and met, and whose voices count, as transport decisions are made. This study uses community-based participatory methods across two contrasting marginalised, low-car urban communities to examine how governance, spatial and cultural dynamics shape need satisfaction through the mobility system.