Dr Eleni Meletiadou, Senior Lecturer and Course Director at GSBL was awarded a UKRI-funded Digital Storytelling Fellowship.
Date: 10 February 2023
The Storytelling Fellowship programme aims to harness the power of stories to learn from, and address, the human aspects of the diffusion of new technologies in industry. These human aspects include themes such as:
- Productivity
- Resilience
- Competitiveness
- Sustainability
- Levelling up / inclusion
- Wellbeing
After participating in a digital storytelling workshop and creating their own digital story, Storytelling Fellows will act as advocates in their wider constituencies, facilitating their own workshops and gathering more digital stories that will be hosted on a dedicated online environment designed to provide actionable insights to businesses.
Dr Eleni Meletiadou said: “From this Storytelling Fellowship, I hope to build my storytelling capacity to make insights from minority groups i.e., women, neurodiverse employees, visible to colleagues, managers, and senior leadership teams. I wish to explore how advanced technologies can help generate and embed new ways of working by opening up career opportunities for otherwise hard-to-reach groups such as women, minorities, older workers, and disabled people. I wish to make these employees’ voices heard and their contributions appreciated”.
Eleni would also like to tell the story of women who try to shatter the glass ceiling of inequality in the workplace. To date, women who work in traditionally male-typed fields and occupations continue to face gender barriers. Her story will identify and reveal barriers that women face in the aircraft industry. It will also highlight the enablers for these women as they need to be supported in their effort to become i.e., pilots and/or flight instructors. Considerable progress has been made to neutralize gender-typed careers but little attention has been given to the multifaceted considerations faced by women who seek to pursue a career in male-dominated industries.
Eleni hopes that her story will help create inclusive organisations about matters related to women in male-typed jobs, i.e., the aircraft industry, and to provide them with tools to recruit and retain women workers. She would like to expand this project and engage policymakers and industry leaders. Her aim is also to interact with a wide network of people from industry and academia (knowledge exchange) and learn how to create, share, and learn from inspiring, compelling stories.
Dr Eleni Meletiadou is a Cost (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Organisation Member and Research Grant Proposal Evaluator and a member of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) - funded and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) - led INTERACT Peer Review College.
.jpg)