Rate My Professor Anna Wilson

Professor Anna Wilson is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in Education in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow, a position to which she was promoted following her appointment as Reader in Interdisciplinary Research in Education in May 2022. She serves as Director of the Centre for Research and Development in Adult and Lifelong Learning (CRADALL) since August 2024. Her academic career spans multiple disciplines and institutions. She began as a nuclear structure physicist, earning a PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of Liverpool in 1996, studying superdeformed states using gamma-ray spectroscopy. After postdoctoral work at the University of York and visiting periods at CNRS-Orsay in France, she joined the Australian National University (ANU), where she developed interests in teaching and learning. There, she obtained a Graduate Certificate and a Masters in Higher Education through ANU's Centre for Educational Development and Academic Methods (CEDAM), researching undergraduate and colleague experiences of research and professional development. She held roles as Associate and Deputy Director (Education) of the Research School of Physics and Engineering, with secondments to CEDAM and the University of Canberra's Teaching and Learning Centre focusing on work-based learning, interdisciplinarity, and research-led education. Subsequently, she worked as an academic developer at Oxford University's Learning Institute, completed a second PhD in Education at the University of Stirling exploring Deleuze, Actor Network Theory, and sociomateriality, served as a postdoctoral researcher leading HCI and social research on the Horizon 2020 Commonfare.net project for an ethical reputation system, and was Lecturer in Lifelong Learning at the University of Stirling.

Wilson's research and teaching examine how individuals, groups, communities, and organizations learn to approach, understand, and address complex knowledge, situations, and challenges, particularly in adult and lifelong learning. Key areas include sustainability (waste, plastics, energy, climate crisis), technologisation of work and life (datafication, digital technologies for decision-making, ethical systems design), and research processes (learning to 'do' research). She develops innovative methods such as fiction, speculative stories, and imaginaries to explore alternative realities. She supervises PhD students on topics including algorithmic technology in primary education, occupational stress in university teaching, and international student experiences with AI. Selected publications include co-authored books 'Radical Ecology in the Face of the Anthropocene Extinction: a New and Urgent Philosophy for Complexity in the Social Sciences' (Routledge, 2024) and 'Social Construction as a Complex Attractor: The Multiple Dimensions of Entanglement, Innovation and Recurrence' (Routledge, 2026); articles 'Place-pedagogies of water stress' (Global Social Challenges Journal, 2025), 'Waste stories: networked imaginaries' (Networked Learning Conference Proceedings, 2024), 'Future ordinaries: assembling place-based knowledges and literacies in real and imagined harmscapes' (Futures, 2024), and 'Your U-Well-Being Journal is due today: on some possible intersections between surveillance and student wellbeing in the future university' (Studies in Higher Education, 2025).