Dr Katy Brickley BA, MA, MA, PhD

Dr Katy Brickley is a Research Assistant for the project Feeling at Home. This three-year study examines the homeliness of group homes for adults with learning disabilities, funded by NIHR’s School for Social Care Research. The goal of the research is to co-create a toolkit and checklist with residents to enable housing providers and residents to create more homely environments.

Katy has a background in refugee advice, working for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and Wiltshire Council before returning to an academic role. With experience in information and translation, Katy is interested in the accessibility of public institutions, and the communicative barriers to understanding which may exist, particularly regarding gaining informed consent.

Having worked on the UK’s government funded ‘Assisted Voluntary Return’ repatriation programmes for asylum seekers, Katy gained ESRC doctoral funding to explore communicative issues in return migration for rejected asylum seekers and irregular migrants. She particularly focused on the issue of informed consent and the voluntariness of return in this multilingual setting. Katy continued this work with an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship which she used to develop practice-based guidance for those working in the sector. This included training for advice staff working with refugees and migrants to understand communicative barriers in their work and strategies to overcome them.

In her spare time, Katy is a trustee of Merlin Theatre in Frome, Somerset, where she lives. Her focus is on audience development, removing barriers for people who might otherwise be unable to attend. Katy also translates information into Easy Read, to make it accessible for people with learning disabilities.

Katy earned a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Language Studies from Cardiff University, a Master of Arts in Translation from the University of the West of England (UWE), and a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics from the Cardiff University.

Research interests:

• Healthcare communication
• Institutional communication
• Language and migration
• Translation processes
• Accessible information / Easy Read
• Food discourses in social media
• Sociolinguistics
• Discourse analysis
• Linguistic ethnography