Sheila Quaid is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Gender at the University of Sunderland. She was awarded Senior Fellowship and a National Teaching Fellowship by Advance HE in recognition of her expertise in teaching and learning. Her research and teaching include critical pedagogies, gender, sexuality and family studies, discomforting pedagogies and teacher narratives of teaching diversity and difference, situated emotionality in research and professional practice. She is currently completing research on the health outcomes and well being effects of hospital gardens; the lives and experiences of women who are not mothers and pedagogies of empowerment. She has previously published work on domestic violence, lesbian motherhood, feminism, fatherhood and masculinity.