Building Bridges for Policy Impact: How to engage with policymaking

Participants will discuss the challenges and rewards of bridging the gap between research and policy, and share insights on how to navigate the policy landscape. Topics will include finding your path in policy engagement, overcoming challenges, fostering successful collaborations, expanding your network, and achieving international policy impact.This event offers valuable guidance for researchers looking to make a difference and real-world impact through their work. Join us to learn from experts and discover how to turn research into action.

List of speakers

Guest speaker - Dr Syahirah Abdul Rahman

Syahirah is a co-editor of "How to Engage Policy Makers with Your Research: The Art of Informing and Impacting Policy." After completing her PhD at the University of Manchester, she joined the Innovation & Research Caucus as an Early Career Researcher Co-Investigator. This £7 million knowledge brokerage programme, co-funded by UKRI, Innovate UK, and the ESRC, aims to bridge social science knowledge with policy. Through her work with the Caucus, Dr Abdul Rahman has gained extensive experience in engaging, collaborating with, and impacting policymakers. Currently, she serves as a Senior Lecturer in Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Oxford Brookes Business School, where she continues to apply her expertise in policy engagement and research impact.

Chair: Dr Saori Shibata

Saori’s research focuses on Japan’s political economy, including the changing nature of work, the digital economy and how Japan’s model of capitalism is transforming. This draws on institutionalist approaches to capitalism and critical political economy. She has published on these topics in journals such as New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy and British Journal of Political Science. She is the author of Contesting Precarity in Japan: The Rise of Nonregular Workers and the New Policy Dissensus published by Cornell University Press.

Dr Sarah Son

Sarah completed her PhD on identity and inter-Korean relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 2014, before spending five years working in South Korea in the non-profit sector on North Korean human rights issues.

Her work there included human rights research and monitoring; reporting and media engagement; consulting with the United Nations, foreign missions and advocacy organisations; and project management of human rights documentation training for NGOs both in and outside Korea.

Her current research involves methods of monitoring and recording human rights abuses in North Korea through interviews with North Korean escapees to South Korea. Alongside this work, she is investigating the potential use of the data gathered on human rights abuses in current and future efforts to pursue accountability for violations.

Dr David Tobin

David has worked as Hallsworth Research Fellow in the Political Economy of China at the University of Manchester. His work is located in the overlap between Asian Studies and Global IR, using critical theory to frame results of detailed empirical fieldwork on the politics of identity and the everyday.

David completed a PhD in Politics at the University of Manchester (2013) following intensive Mandarin language training at Peking University and Xinjiang University. He has lectured in Politics and East Asian Studies at the University of Manchester, University of Glasgow, and the University of Nottingham-Ningbo.

Please contact the event organizer Dr Kahee Jo at if you wish to join from outside the UK or online.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Lecture Theatre 9, The Diamond,, 32 Leavygreave Road, Sheffield, United Kingdom