Gem teaches and publishes on the subjects of gender and feminism, film and spatial production, futures and fictions, narrative and storytelling, reality and representation, career and enterprise, teaching and learning, interiors and architecture. As founding director of the Experimental Realism platform which hosts an online Project Store; a collection of speculative design projects created by students from universities around the world, she also established a global mentoring programme with a speculative design / futures practitioner; designed to build community, encourage open discourse and facilitate the transition from education into practice. Gem is co-founder of the Office for Speculative Spatial Design (O-SSD) a Think Tank for research-led speculative spatial design. Through our work we contribute to policy change, towards a more just and inclusive society.

Gem is interested in supervising theses that question categories and definitions of interiors, the study of fictocritical imagined environments, emerging programmes and behaviours in relation to genders and identities, pleasure and entertainment, relationships and interactions, speculative design methodologies and intersections there of.

For more information on Gem's work, please visit: https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/gem-barton/