Kevin Guyan

I joined the University of Edinburgh Business School as a Chancellor's Fellow in 2024. My research explores the intersection of data and identity, with a particular focus on data practices that engage LGBTQ communities in the UK.

Between 2021 and 2024, I worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow on an international project investigating gender equity policies in the film and TV industry. Before joining the University of Glasgow, I worked for a higher education organisation that focuses on diversity, equality and inclusion among staff and students in universities and colleges. In 2016, I completed a PhD in history at University College London.

I am a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Young Academy of Scotland, sit on Young Scot’s Data Advisory Group and the board of the LGBTI human rights charity Equality Network.

I am the author of Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), which examines the collection, analysis and use of gender, sex and sexuality data, particularly as it relates to LGBTQ people. My work on queer data has had broad academic, policy and societal impacts, including the design of gender, sex and sexuality questions in UK censuses. In 2022, I presented evidence from my research at the Scottish Parliament’s Equalities, Human Rights & Civil Justice Committee on data impacts of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

I am interested in the datafication of identity characteristics in organisational contexts, the tools used to gather this information (e.g. workplace diversity monitoring forms) and how these methods work in a generative way: they do not merely count, categorise and manage our identities (e.g. ‘gay', ‘Black’ and ‘woman’), they shape how we understand identity and what we collectively do based on that understanding.

I am currently writing my second book, which explores queer encounters with different classification systems in the UK, from hate crime reporting to dating apps.