G’day, nice to see you.
This website is where I share some of the things I do: teacher development, research culture/organisational development, and thinking about how people learn, teach, and communicate. I’m interested in big ideas and —maybe more so— in what happens when you bring those big ideas into real life.
There’s some playful stuff in here too: storytelling, illustration, metaphor, and other ways of making complicated ideas clearer, stranger, and/or more memorable.
Because this is what I do: take big, complex, theory-infused ideas and make them accessible, useful, and even fun.
Some of what’s here is serious. Some is a bit sideways. Quite a lot of it sits somewhere in between.
See what catches your eye…
Phiona
Self and Assemblage in Autoethnography
AUDIOBOOK EXCERPTS
To listen to Self and Assemblage on Soundcloud, click HERE.
The seeds of Self and Assemblage …
This 2023 conference paper was one of the points of origin for this book. In it, you can see how my ideas are starting to come together about the question of selfhood and its centrality to “auto” ethnography and to qualitative research more broadly.
Book launch!
4pm, Tuesday 27th October 2026, University of Edinburgh.
Specifics coming soon.
Thinking with metaphors
What supermarkets, yoga, and weight training teach us about AI in education.
What paint charts and grass can teach us about what a language “level” really is.
What parcel delivery and Ice Age art tell us about what it means to “teach” (or learn) something.
The Doctor and the Egg
My 2017 book A critical autoethnography of learning Spanish: Intercultural competence on the Gringo Trail is about intercultural (mis)understandings in Latin America: between local people and Westerners who visit as backpackers, learners of Spanish, and as volunteers, often in healthcare settings.
Since not everyone wants to read an academic book (I know - strange, eh?), I also made an idea from this project into this watercolours/ink hand-painted zine.
We often imagine intercultural problems as gaps in knowledge: just explain the facts better, and misunderstanding disappears.
But expertise is never simply transmitted. People interpret what they are told, through relationships, histories, identities and assumptions about whose knowledge can be trusted.
This is why I say:
Truth does not travel far without trust.
This central question — how does knowledge travel across cultural difference? — sits underneath much of my work.
Think better. Teach better.
Ideas matter. They matter more when you can apply them: to work better and to make sense of complexity.
This is what I do. I work with teachers and organisations to make complex thinking accessible, practical and useful.
Here are some images from the teacher development workshops I delivered in Uzbekistan in August 2026.
Complex ideas, made useful.
Complex ideas, made useful.
I’m the author of six books, all published with Routledge. (Academic books are silly expensive, I know: Google Books has most of these as previews, or try your library!)
I’ve also published around fifty academic papers, including many SCOPUS-indexed, peer-reviewed journal articles.
Pre-academia, I spent twelve years in the TESOL industry, as an English teacher (UK, Peru, Qatar), academic manager (Poland, UK, China), CELTA trainer (Australia), and ELT Editor at Oxford University Press (UK).
My PhD (2007-2010) was on Westerners teaching English in China. It won the Monash PhD medal and the International Education Association of Australia (IEAA) research award.
As an academic in TESOL (2006-2018), I started as a Lecturer at the University of South Australia then moved to UNSW Sydney as Senior Lecturer. I mostly taught MEd.
Then I worked as Associate Professor in Intercultural Business Communication (IBC) in the Tourism & IBC group at Edinburgh Napier University (Jan 2019 to Dec 2025).
At Napier, I was seconded for three years as the university-wide Deputy Head of Research for Research Culture. A lot of the work was listening: running focus groups and staff capacity-building workshops across the university, working out what was getting in the way of research and community building, and feeding that intel back to senior leadership.
Storytelling
Ideas are good. Stories are sometimes even better.
My solo Edinburgh Festival Fringe show, as part of The Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas, 2023.
Not all research writing is boring (I promise!)
English language teacher development workshops
A teacher development workshop that I ran on intelligibility versus proficiency.
Fergana, August 2026.
A teacher development workshop that I ran on intelligibility versus proficiency.
Tashkent, August 2026.
A teacher development workshop that I ran on intercultural communication.
Tashkent, August 2026.