Dr Cristina Costa (LinkedIn Profile)
Associate Professor & Co-Director of the Durham Research Methods Centre, Durham University
Dr Cristina Costa’s work sits at the nexus of digital practices, societal issues and education, with a strong focus on theory to practice research. She leads and contributes to projects that explore critical digital literacies, digital inequalities, curriculum design, and the ethics of educational technologies, including Gen-AI in education. As Co‑Director of the MA in Research Methods at Durham, she is deeply committed to interdisciplinary research methods training, working with students, community partners, schools, and policy organisations. She is particularly interested in research methods that unearth people’s lived experiences, including methods of co-production of knowledge and narrative inquiries.
Cristina Costa also leads the Research Cluster Digital Society and Education
Dr Michaela Oliver (LinkedIn Profile)
Associate Professor, School of Education, and Associate Executive Dean for Education and Student Progression, Durham University
Dr Michaela Oliver’s research focuses on issues related to digital education, literacies and citizenship. She is particularly interested in discipline-specific reasoning practices and explores how to promote reasoning in educational settings. The roles of pedagogical task design, dialogic and collaborative teaching and learning approaches are considered in relation to the promotion of reasoning about complex digital issues.
Michaela Oliver also leads the Research Cluster Digital Society and Education
Dr Yuanya Zhang’s research interests include educational marginalisation, school culture, digital youth culture and ethnography. Her recently completed PhD examines the lived schooling experiences of “low-achieving” students and the ways these experiences intersect with their social media engagement.
She currently works as a Research Assistant on the Digital Wellbeing project.
Yuanya Zhang also leads the Digital Society and Education Emerging Researcher Network.