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Our People
Dr Stephen Baker
Lecturer in Film & Television Studies
Dr Stephen Baker
Lecturer in Film & Television Studies
Life Before Ulster
Dr Stephen Baker has over 20 years teaching experience in higher education, having been a Senior Lecture in Film and Television Studies at the University of Northampton, and an Associate Lecture with Open University’s MA Media & Cultural Studies.
Teaching
Stephen has taught widely across Media and Cultural Studies, including Britain and Ireland on screen; media and cultural theory; news and conflict; and media practice.
Research
Stephen’s research interests are closely aligned with his teaching, and broadly examine the relationship between media, culture and politics. He has co-authored two books with Greg McLaughlin – The Propaganda of Peace (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), which looks at media and cultural representations of the Northern Ireland peace process, and The British Media and Bloody Sunday (Bristol: Intellect, 2016). He has also written about the culture and political economy of post-conflict Belfast, as well as representations of class in British television drama.
Civic Roles
Stephen’s research and teaching underscores his work with a variety of community projects and trade union initiatives. He has a longstanding relationship with Trademark Belfast, a social justice co-operative established by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to tackle sectarianism and inequality. He has contributed to workshops and courses offered by the Ex-Prisoners Assistance Committee (Expac) in the field of peace and reconciliation; and has written an Intercomm report for the Office of the First and Deputy First Minister on the media representation of working class unionism.
Dr Gail Baylis
Lecturer - Media Studies
Dr Gail Baylis
Lecturer - Media Studies
Life Before Ulster
Before coming to UU Dr Gail Baylis completed a Foundation Course in Art at Cardiff Art College. An interest in the importance of the visual in culture is a continuing thread that connects her teaching, research and publications. She completed a BA Hons in English and D.Phil in English.
Her D.Phil, entitled ‘Literary Representations of London 1660-1760’ engages with the intersection between literary precedent and lived experience for literary expression in poetry, drama, the novel, polemical writing and social commentary of the period.
Later she completed an MA in Popular Culture (Open University) for which her dissertation focused on a series of carte de visite portraits of Welsh women mining workers.
Teaching
Gail has taught across a range of subject areas from English, Gender Studies, Media and Journalism. Her field of interest is the visual and its significance for communication and memory.
Her research areas inform her teaching in terms of interdisciplinary approach for engagement with visual materials in culture.
She has supervised a number of PhDs on photography, both as written-only and with a practice component along with MA dissertation in Journalism and final year dissertations in Media and Journalism.
A research post on the pedagogy learning resulted in her producing a workshop series for wring skills and she holds a HEA Fellowship.
Research
Research interests include photographic theory and history, visual culture and gender studies.
Both research and publications focus on an interdisciplinary approach that combines photographic theory, visual studies, social history and memory.
She has published numerous chapters and articles in international peer reviewed journals on photography and Ireland and the importance of the visual in culture. She is also a peer reviewer for several photographic and communication studies journals.
An underpinning of her research is archival study and an engagement with the materiality of images and the effects of digitalisation on an understanding of the agency of image communication
Civic Roles
Gail has contributed to a number of collaborative projects, including work with Belfast Exposed and the Ulster Museum.
She has given lunchtime talks at the Ulster Museum on the research.
She has been a member of the Irish Research Council Postgraduate Awards Board.
Dr Jolene Mairs Dyer
Lecturer in Media Production
Dr Jolene Mairs Dyer
Lecturer in Media Production
Before Ulster
Dr Jolene Mairs Dyer studied English Literature at the University of Sunderland before spending a year living and working in Toronto, Canada. She returned to Northern Ireland where she worked in the Northern Ireland Housing Executive before completing a Masters of Social Work (MSW) at Queen’s University, Belfast. She briefly worked in Child Protection services before moving into the field of Mental Health.
In England, she worked in a private secure hospital for women before working for the NHS in an outpatient therapy service providing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and Analytic therapeutic groupwork. Alongside this she began making documentary films (her first film was screened at short film festival in Belfast) and returned to Northern Ireland to complete a Masters in Documentary Practice at Ulster University.
This led to her PhD, which combined her experience as a Mental Health professional with her interest in film via her practice-led PhD in documentary filmmaking: ‘Audiovisual Storytelling in Post-conflict Northern Ireland. Participant and audience responses to filming, editing and exhibiting memories of the Troubles via two practice-led collaborative documentary film productions’.
She began working as a Lecturer in Media Production at Ulster University in 2013 after completing her PhD.
Teaching
Dr Mairs Dyer has taught editing theory and practice with an emphasis on key theoretical and technical developments from the silent era through to the present. She has taught Media and Mental Health, focussing how mental health is represented across TV, film and print media as well as the impact of social media on its users. She has also taught Research Methods with an emphasis on key research skills such as literature reviews and textual analysis. In addition, she has taught Counter Screens, a module that familiarises students with the characteristics of dominant and ‘counter’ cinema. Dr Mairs Dyer currently teaches the history, theory and practice of documentary as well the history, theory and practice of feminist film production. She also currently teaches Screen Analysis, where she introduces students to core research methods such as semiotics and ideological analysis.
Dr Mairs Dyer’s pedagogic approach promotes student-centred, active learning, particularly in relation to large group teaching. She completed the PgCHEP at Ulster University in 2016, which solidified her belief in the necessity of interactivity as a tool to consolidate learning. She actively encourages students to operationalize and consolidate key concepts and skills in order to promote Bigg’s (1999: 60) notion of ‘deep learning’ whereby ‘meaning is not imposed or transmitted by direct instruction but is created by the student’s learning activities.’ She has been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) since 2016.
Dr Mairs Dyer has collaborated with Dr Helen Jackson, Philip O’Neill and undergraduate students to create Risky Business (2017) an interactive online teaching tool that improves student engagement with, and knowledge of, the risk assessment process in creative filmmaking projects. It won the 2018 International MEDEA Award for user-generated content.
Dr Mairs Dyer partnered with Antoine Rivoire in Ulster’s Digital Programme and Innovation Office to create the unique Online Ethical and Location Risk Assessment Approval System (OELRAAS), an online digital tool that combines ethical approval with location risk assessment practice for film production. This system has been fully integrated into Screen Production’s equipment lending and risk assessment processes and practices. This system has been adopted by Cinematic Arts on Magee campus and by Digital Media Production on Coleraine campus.
Research
Dr Mairs Dyer has research interests in collaborative documentary filmmaking/creative practice with marginalized groups. As part of her PhD research, she produced two collaborative documentary films. She filmed and edited Unheard Voices (2009), a 30min documentary telling the stories of six people who lost a loved one or were themselves injured as a result of the Troubles.
She also edited material from Cahal McLaughlin’s Prisons Memory Archive to create Unseen Women: Stories from Armagh Gaol (2011), a 26min documentary and multi-screen gallery installation shown at Belfast Exposed in June 2011. She extended to this to her collaborative visual practice with women living in interface areas of North Belfast to co-create the photobooks, Women's Vision from Across the Barricades (2015) and Women’s Vision in Transition (2020), which are part of the Martin Parr photobook collection in the Tate Modern, London.
More recently, she has co-produced 360° films with Vincent Kinnaird of Notasuch Productions, Total Immersion (2022) and The Beat Goes On (2022). This on-going collaboration has resulted in the production of a short documentary, I’m from the Road (2025), co-created with Vincent Kinnaird and the Marion Centre for Excellence, an educational organization that provides flexible learning pathways for young people. Dr Mairs Dyer’s research interests in feminist film practice and immersive filmmaking has resulted in the creation of the 360° horror-style short film Crow (2025), which highlights on-street sexual harassment.
Dr. Mairs Dyer's theoretical research has resulted in her development of the concept of the Matrixial Screen Encounter, which uses psychoanalytic theory to conceptualize the intersubjective gaze in documentary filmmaking and offers a novel model of theorizing collective filmic authorship.
Dr Mairs Dyer is currently an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Media Practice and Education.
She welcomes applications from practice-led and theoretical PhD students, particularly those that are interested in using documentary/feminist/creative research methods as a means of representing marginalized groups.
Civic Work
As a collaborative, practice-led practitioner, Dr Mairs Dyer’s research is rooted in civic contribution. Her practice-led PhD research was embedded in work with community organisations, most notably with WAVE Trauma, a charity that supports people affected by the Troubles. Screenings of her work have taken place in community settings across Northern Ireland, the UK and the US. Her projects Women's Vision from Across the Barricades (2015)and Women’s Vision in Transition (2020) saw her work with Shankill Women’s Centre and the Greater North Belfast Women’s Network.
Dr. Mairs Dyer also plays an active role in creative and academic communities. She currently serves as the Northern Ireland Coordinator for the Global Media Monitoring Project. She has twice served as an Executive Committee member of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS). She has acted as Jury Member for the Maysles Award for Best Observational Documentary at Docs Ireland International Film Festival. She regularly chairs post-screening discussion and Q&A’s with documentary filmmakers at this festival.
Since 2022, Dr Mairs Dyer has acted as the Director of Belfast Feminist Film School, a civic film education programme that provides training, equipment and access to postproduction software to women who would otherwise be unable to access HE-level resources. BFFS works with women from a wide range of backgrounds in partnership with community groups such as Shankill Women’s Centre, Women’s Resource and Development Agency and Film Hub NI. BFFS’s model of civic engagement is unique in that it actively invests in the communities it serves.
