Dr Natasa Lackovic

Senior Lecturer

Research Overview

I am an international leader in multiple literacies (e.g. media/sustainability/postdigital/creative youth mental health/employability literacies), innovative methods and digital media applications in education.

Over the last decade, my research has been contributing to shaping education futures through relational, multimodal and arts-informed frameworks for educational and social change. These acknowledge the role of social connections, place, materiality and technology in understanding knowledge, teaching and learning.

Two recent monographs (Inquiry Graphics in Higher Education, 2020, Palgrave McMillan) and (Relational and Multimodal Higher Education, co-written with A. Olteanu, 2024, Routledge) present holistic outcomes of the above mentioned developments.

As of recent, I have been interested in how citizens/city-dwellers learn and how universities help mediate the development of different citizen literacies, as linked to the notion of the learning city (the UNESCO learning cities and PASCAL network), which is my latest international project.

Notably, I have been developing methods and theoretical perspectives to bridging persistent dualisms in education, such as "image-concept", "concrete-abstract", "us-them" and "mind-body" in tackling pressing social, representational, and environmental crises. My approaches also aim to enhance analytical, creative, and transformative thinking on a variety of important educational topics in teaching-learning interactions and research.

I am an inter(cross-)disciplinary scholar, and I resist defining myself through looking into only one area or topic. If I was to position myself in a field or discipline, this would be a challenge, as there is always more than one to list: semiotics, media and communication, learning sciences, educational philosophy, visual arts, socio/new materialism.

Professional Role

I am a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy (SFHEA).

In my research, I am working on advancing our understanding of the role of embodiment, materiality (in both physical and digital representation form), images, art and artefacts in education and society. Passionate about matters of social justice, innovation, interdisciplinarity and relational ontology.

At Lancaster University, I am currently:• a co-Director of Social Futures Centre, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FASS)

Current Teaching

PhD module Leader: I teach on the online Doctoral Programme in Higher Education Research, Evaluation and Enhancement (HEREE) and I lead the module ED.S842: "Enhancing Learning Teaching and Assessment".
MA module Leader: I lead a module Ed.S836 "Policies, Ideologies and Interventions in Education" for all students on the departmental online masters programmes.
I also teach face to face on the residential programme in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL).

External Roles

Co-Editor, Video Journal of Educational Pedagogy, Brill
Editorial Board, the Postdigital Science and Education journal, Springer.
Executive Committee (rep. Great Britain): International Association of Semioitc Studies (IASS)
External Advisor, International Association of Visual Pedagogies
Research Associate, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade
Advisory Board (Why Still Education? International Confernece)

Web Links

Designer, co-ordinator, leader and copy right owner of the Lancaster University's interdisciplinary hub GNC ReOPeN web page, Graphic Novels and Comics Research, Outreach, Pedagogy (and Engagement) Network.

PhD Supervisions Completed

Experienced doctoral thesis supervisor, over 20 PhD theses supervised to completion.

Career Details

I have had more than 17 years of experience working in the field of Education, and more than 10 years working in the field of Higher Education.

I began work as Lecturer at Lancaster University in September 2014. Prior to that, I worked at the University of Nottingham as doctoral researcher (PhD) and Research Assistant/Fellow, where I completed my PhD in 2014, having been awarded a Visual Learning Lab and the Learning Sciences Research Institute Fellowship.

I was a European Council Erasmus Mundus Fellow at the UCL/Institute of Education, London (UK), where I graduated from an international MA degree in Lifelong Learning: Policy and Management in 2010.

PhD Supervision Interests

I am interested in supervising students whose interests relate to visual, material and digital culture/research/pedagogy, multimodality, semiotics in education, socio-materiality, social justice/critical theory and critical media literacy. Areas of interest include critical approachers to graduate employability, teaching-learning designs, student empowerment, art-based methods and post-truth/humanism/digital.