BA (Vind), MSc Education (Edinburgh)
Miriam Bonello MacQuarrie (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher, policy analyst and educator whose work bridges educational policy, public health and critical justice-oriented approaches to understanding and preventing violence perpetration. This is the lens she will draw on in her role as the interim Sexual Health and Safety Officer.
Her professional and academic work has focused on transforming institutional response to sexual violence through research, policy reform and education. At the University of King’s College, her career began in revising the University’s sexual health and safety response policy, followed by working as the sexual violence policy student liaison (SVPSL) for two years. These roles were undertaken alongside her work for Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group (NSPIRG) where Miriam authored a booklet on eating disorders in the post-secondary community in the context of Covid-19. These roles involved creating sexual violence prevention and sexual health promotion curriculum, accessible health education resources, and facilitating comprehensive community sexual education initiatives. Following her graduation with distinction from a combined honours degree in Sociology and Gender and Women’s Studies, Miriam took a role with the Alcohol, Harm Reduction, and Sexual Violence Prevention (AHRSVP) Working Group as an Environmental Scan Researcher. In this role, she conducted research on alcohol-involved sexual violence within the post-secondary context. Miriam produced a comprehensive research report that integrated interview data with existing scholarly literature and collaborated closely with the AHRSVP to develop a robust set of recommendations for post-secondary institutions aimed at preventing sexual violence. This paper is forthcoming.
The insights gained from these experiences inspired Miriam to pursue a Masters of Science in Education at the University of Edinburgh. This program deepened her expertise in qualitative research as well as policy analysis and development. Her studies encompassed critical engagement with child and adolescent mental health and well-being, education planning and management, curriculum design, pedagogy, and practice, internationalized and globalized education, and the state and the politics of knowledge. Her dissertation critically examined the rise of digitally-influenced misogynistic radicalization in classrooms amid the global entrenchment of neoliberalism, widening social inequality, and growing political polarization. This dissertation bridged her current research interests in critical masculinity studies, the affective turn in social research, and post-structural analyses of discourse and othering, continuing her longstanding commitment to critical research paradigms.
