Ladan is a senior postdoctoral researcher at Durham University. She is involved with social innovation research projects and uses action research in her collaboration with and support of SMEs and the public sector in the County Durham area through her role on CFNE. Ladan’s particular focus is on the digital economy, culture and heritage, and arts and crafts practitioners and businesses. She is also working on a NERC-funded research project, Java Flood One, (2020-2021) exploring bringing creative participatory methods to improve flood warnings and response in Indonesia.
Ladan brings her experience working on the first phase of Creative Fuse at Durham (2017-2019). She was also postdoctoral researcher on the ERDF-funded Water Hub project (2019-2020) Previously she was at Teesside University (2015-2017) where she was a senior lecturer in computer games. Ladan’s PhD research was a virtual ethnography looking at how groups form, compete and perform in an online computer game (World of Warcraft).
Her research interests include: social innovation, creative sector evaluation and policy, games design, games and pedagogy, gamification, culture in games, creativity, qualitative and arts-based research methods, writing and digital technologies.