Dr Eve Mayes (she/her) is a Senior Research Fellow at Research for Educational Impact (REDI) within the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Australia. Her work is centrally concerned with young people’s differential experiences of attempting to effect political change in settler colonial institutions in and beyond schooling. Her projects and publications are situated at the intersection of the sociology of education, sociology of youth and social movement studies.

Eve is committed to critical, creative and participatory forms of research that are fuelled by and responsive to young people’s concerns, and that interrogate the operations and possibilities of power in young people’s political work. She is currently working on the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) project Striking Voices: Australian school-aged climate students’ justice activism (2022-2025). This is a participatory ethnographic project with young people involved in climate justice activism, about young people’s experiences of activist organising and education; four young (19-22) activist organisers are core members of the research team.

Eve’s book The Politics of Voice in Education (2023, Edinburgh University Press) critiques the liberal humanist and late capitalist logics of student voice in educational reform, whilst affirming other possibilities for transformative pedagogical relations in and beyond institutional sites of education. Eve has been a co-convenor of the activist-scholar Earth Unbound collective since 2021; she is co-editor of a collection of the collective’s work (forthcoming 2024, Bristol University Press). Eve is an Associate Investigator in the cross-institutional ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child and is on the research team for the international project Young people’s learning in digital worlds.