Biography
Professor Mihaela Kelemen is Chair in Business and Society at Nottingham University Business School, UK where she is also Director of Professional Practice. She has developed a creative methodology of stakeholder engagement and knowledge co-production entitled Cultural Animation which underpins a variety of participatory research projects - funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Global Challenges Research Fund, Economic and Social Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Medical Research Council and Higher Education Funding Council for England - on topics including community leadership, food poverty, sustainability, health inequalities, and post-disaster reconstruction. Her methodology has been used in over 30 projects across the UK as well as internationally in Canada, Japan, the Philippines, Greece, Kenya and Pakistan. Her most recent project focuses on hardly reached communities and the importance of their voice and agency in building trust with relevant institutions in order to address health inequalities. She disseminates her findings in top academic journals as well as via books, podcasts, interviews, virtual games, documentary dramas and community based exhibitions curated jointly with the award winning New Vic Theatre from Staffordshire. She is an expert at the University of Nottingham Rights Lab, a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, as well as a member of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships Peer Review College and of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College.
Research
Mihaela’s research is underpinned by the Classical American Pragmatist school of thought which argues that individuals inquire through experience and the purpose of theory is the betterment of human condition. Cultural Animation is a methodology that embodies the principles of American Pragmatism by encouraging multiple ways of knowing and valuing in equal measure academic expertise, practical skills and ordinary experience. Cultural Animation builds trusting relationships between diverse parties by inviting them to work together in a series of creative activities which start with a picture of the present and proceed with imagining a shared desirable future. It serves as a useful methodology and a form of social engagement that can facilitate the building of futures that account for voices which are usually missing from research and policy dialogues.
She has recently become fascinated by the concept of hope and the possibility of constructing vocabularies and methodologies of hope in business and societal research. Hope is a distinctive feature of human agency which plays a crucial role in individual and societal transformation by facilitating the development of inclusive futures. Organizations and society are arguably both targets and sites of hope and therefore studying hope could enlighten and invigorate scholarly endeavours across a variety of disciplines as well as provide a platform for social change.
Publications
INGRAM, C; CARUANA, R.; CHAKRABARTY, A.; KELEMEN, M.; YUAN, R. (2023)., "Consumer anxiety and coping in Covid times: Towards a sociological understanding of consumer resilience" Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385231190234
FAUX-NIGHTINGALE, A, KELEMEN, M., LILLEY, S. and STEWART, C. (2022), Sensemaking in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic: A narrative exploration of polarised morality in an NHS Trust, Sociology of Health and Illness, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13586
SURMAN, E., KELEMEN, M. and RUMENS, N. (2021) Ways to care: forms and possibilities of compassion within UK food banks, Sociological Review, 69/5: 1090-1106 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026121991330
KELEMEN, M. and RUMENS, N. (2019) Re-asserting paradigm plurality: Pragmatism and co-production in Management and Organisation Studies, Studi di Sociologia, 1: pp 81-92, https://doi.org/10.26350/000309_000053
ZAMENOPOULOS, T.; LAM. B.; ALEXIOU, K.; KELEMEN, M.; DE SOUSA, S.; MOFFAT, S.; PHILLIPS, M. (2019) The role of boundary objects and processes in co-design: empowerment and democratisation of knowledge, Journal of Co-design, 21:4, 605-624 https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2019.1605383
MILLWARD, H. A.,KELEMEN, M. and MANGAN, A. (2019), Co-Producing community and individual change through theatrical interventions, Organizational Aesthetics: 8/1, 34-50
https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/oa/vol8/iss1/8
SURMAN, E., KELEMEN, M., MILLWARD, H. and MOFFAT, S. (2018), Food, ethics and community: Using Cultural Animation to develop a food vision for North Staffordshire, Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2/2, pp. 17-25, https://journal.ethicalconsumer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JCE_2_...
LIN, Y., KELEMEN, M. and TRESIDDER, R. (2018) Post-disaster tourism: building resilience through community-led approaches in the aftermath of the 2011 disasters in Japan, Journal of Sustainable Tourism. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2018.1511720
KELEMEN, M., RUMENS, N. and VO, L. C. (2018) Questioning and Organization Studies. Organization Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618783350
KELEMEN, M. and HAMILTON L. (2018) Creative processes of impact making: Advancing an American Pragmatist methodology, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management https://doi.org/10.1108/QROM-03-2017-1506
LAM, B., PHILLIPS, M., KELEMEN, M., ZAMENOPOULOS, T., MOFFAT, S. and de SOUSA, S. (2018), Design and creative methods as a practice of liminality in community-academic research projects, The Design Journal https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2018.1469329
KELEMEN M., SURMAN E., and DIKOMITIS L. (2018) Cultural animation in health research: An innovative methodology for patient and public involvement and engagement. Health Expectations https://doi.org/10.1111/hex.12677
GOULDING, C., KELEMEN, M. and KIYOMIYA, T. (2018) Community based responses to the Japanese Tsunami: a bottom up approach, European Journal of Operational Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2017.11.066
KELEMEN, M., MANGAN, A and MOFFAT, S. (2017), ‘A little act of kindness?’: Towards a typology of volunteering as unpaid work, Sociology, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0038038517692512
LAM, B., ZAMENOPOULOS, T., KELEMEN, M. and NA, J. H. (2017) Unearth hidden assets through community co-design and co-production, The Design Journal, 20:sup1, S3601-S3610 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352863
BURGESS, G., KELEMEN, M., MOFFAT, S. and PARSONS, E. (2017), Using performative knowledge production to explore marketplace exclusion, Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal https://doi.org/10.1108/QMR-09-2016-0085
VO, L. C. and KELEMEN, M. (2017), Collaborating across the researcher-practitioner divide: introducing John Dewey's democratic experimentalism, Journal of Organisational Change Management http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/JOCM-03-2016-0054
LIN,Y., KELEMEN, M. and KIYOMIYA, T (2017). The role of community leadership in disaster recovery projects: Tsunami lessons from Japan. Int. J. Proj. Manag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2016.09.005
MANGAN, A., KELEMEN, M. and MOFFAT, S. (2016), Animating the classroom: Pedagogical responses to internationalisation, Management Learning, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507615598908
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