Yvonne Downs

Research Fellow in Financial Ethics and Governance, University of Huddersfield

Yvonne’s previous experiences in education, financial services and business inform her work as Research Assistant to the Financial Ethics and Governance Research Group (FEGReG). She began her career teaching German and French in the secondary and tertiary sectors before obtaining funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to study for an MA in Women’s Studies at the University of Bradford. This had a profound influence on her thinking and her self-designation as someone who does feminist research. After several years working in the financial services industry she set up her own personal and professional development business and was also director of a company specialising in coaching for managers. Receipt of funding, first from the University of Sheffield for an MA in Educational Research and later an ESRC studentship, enabled a return to education and doctoral research. She was awarded her PhD in 2011.

Yvonne’s overarching passion is for the theories, politics and practices of research and their implication in setting the parameters of knowledge. She is also fundamentally curious about people and their everyday interactions with and negotiations of social systems. This drives the substantive foci of her research, her methodological allegiances and her use of particular conceptual and evaluative frameworks. She specialises in qualitative research, particularly narrative methodologies, and specifically life history genres, because of their potential to offer fresh vantage points in understanding the dynamic between the personal, historical and the social. In addition to supporting the research of FEGReG students and members, Yvonne won funding from the Business School in 2013 to investigate narratives of the lived experience of financial ethics and to evaluate methodologies for researching sensitive topics in this field. This work informs research on the implementation of financial regulation, to be carried out by a doctoral student on a scholarship funded by the Business School and supervised by Yvonne. She is interested in the implications for identity and subjectivity in a climate where financial metrics dominate the attribution and assessment of value and is continuing to develop these ideas in the context of the financialisation of Higher Education and through the prism of individual biographies. Related interests centre on corporate social responsibility and the social construction of the accounting profession. Returning to her deeply buried roots, Yvonne is also developing her ideas on the application of literary theories in reading company annual reports.