Susana Melo is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Nottingham, in the United Kingdom. Her main research interests are in international social policy, education policy and new modes of multi-scalar education governance, especially within the context of European political and economic processes of supra-national regionalisation.
In Nottingham, she is currently working together with Professor John Holford in the major international research project LLLight’in’Europe. In this context, her research focuses on exploring how certain public policy environments within the European Union (EU) may encourage enterprises to facilitate lifelong learning by their employees. In her previous research work, upon which her PhD dissertation is based, she looked into the positionality of the Council of Europe in relation to the major transformations in the pan-European higher education sector that began in the late 1990s with the emergence of the Bologna Process and the EU-driven strategy for ‘modernising’ universities.
Susana’s interest in researching education has been formed out of her study and work experiences in different European countries, learning environments and levels of education. Prior to moving to Nottingham, she had obtained her BA (Hons) and professional teaching qualification from the University of Lisbon and worked in adult second language education for almost 10 years, holding a number of teaching posts in Barcelona, Budapest and Lisbon. Subsequently, she was trained as a cross-disciplinary social science researcher and was awarded her PhD in Political Sociology of Education by the University of Bristol in 2013.