Dr. Matthew Jenkins (Ph.D., Cardiff) [He/Him] is the Policy and Campaigns Coordinator at Leeds University Union in Leeds, England. His day-to-day work centres around the successful delivery of a variety of democratic processes at the union and supporting student-led campaigns at a local, regional, and national level. He is especially involved in sortition-based decision-making at the ‘LUU Better Forums’ and the training of student campaigners in campaign coordination, strategy, and planning. Around this he also works on several long-term democracy improvement and empowerment projects; from ensuring democratic representation of marginalised voices at the union, to improving the transparency and accountability of internal policy implementation procedures. He is currently working to ensure that student-led policy is implemented more consistently in a way which treats students as experts in the future of their union.
Prior to taking up this post, he completed a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science at Cardiff University working on structural analyses of replication failures and the role of theory in designing highly replicable experiments. He was examined by Prof. Alessandra Tanesini and Dist. Prof. Edouard Machery. His research prepared him for the complexities of implementing and supporting policy and teaching prepared him to engage enthusiastically with students’ wildcard ideas!