Reclaim, Resist, Reimagine: PRME UK & Ireland at the 13th RMER Conference
From 2–4 September 2026, members of the PRME UK & Ireland Chapter travelled to Leuphana University in Lüneburg for the 13th Responsible Management Education Research (RMER) Conference, hosted by PRME Chapter DACH. This year's theme ‘Reclaim, Resist, Reimagine: Sustainability and the Future of Responsible Management Education’ felt especially timely, as the conference itself put it: a call to equip future leaders with "systems thinking, ethical judgment, reflexivity, and the capacity to navigate complexity and uncertainty" at a moment when sustainability commitments are being diluted, contested, and politicised.
Five of PRME UK & Ireland’s Steering Committee were fortunate to attend: Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas (Chair), Laura Steele (Vice Chair), Petros Vourvachis (Treasurer), Karen Cripps (Secretary), and Claire May. Several other members of the PRME UK and Ireland Chapter also represented the Chapter in leading a track – Konstantina Skritsovali (Local Network co-Lead Northwest England and North Wales) and PRME Global Champions - Nahid Yazdani (University of Nottingham – PRME Champion) and Noemi Sinkovics (Newcastle Business School) who participated in the panel discussion ‘Make Science Great Again’.
This strong representation enabled the Chapter to connect with PRME colleagues across the programme through track leadership, paper presentations, a poster, and cross-Chapter strategy conversations. Here's a flavour of what we got up to.
Shaping the pedagogy conversation
Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas (Ravensbourne University London) co-chaired Track 11, Innovative Pedagogies and Impactful Practice for Responsible Management Education, alongside Konstantina Skritsovali (Liverpool John Moores University). The Track was the first initiative of the newly formed PRME Working Group on RME in the Classroom, and was one of the conference's most active tracks, running across three full parallel sessions — giving Natascha and Konstantina a front-row seat to a huge range of teaching innovation from across the PRME community, and giving PRME UK & Ireland real visibility at the heart of the programme.
Karen Cripps presented her paper in Track 18 Addressing the Awareness to Action Gap. Cultivating transformative agency through responsible management education. Her paper ‘Reclaiming the Human Story: Sustainability-Employability Storytelling for the Age of AI-Mediated Recruitment’ explored how SDG-based storytelling can help students reclaim authentic career narratives in an era of AI-mediated hiring. This project began through PRME UK & Ireland innovative pedagogy seed funding and continues to evolve today – hopefully now with European collaborators too! This enabled discussion too around the newly formed PRME Working Group on Responsible Work and Purposeful Careers.
Showcasing our own Chapter's practice
Laura Steele and Claire May showcased some of PRME UK & Ireland's pioneering and inspiring work, co-presenting Cultivating Communities of Practice in Responsible Management Education: Lessons from the PRME UK & Ireland Innovative Pedagogy Competition. They shared how their extended work to ensure the success of our Chapter's competition has built a genuine community of practice among UK & Ireland educators. Their willingness to share the methods and motivations behind the seed funding competition, the variety of topics and disciplines covered by competition winners and the range of artefacts and exemplars produced as a result of this work was inspiring for other Chapters to hear about.
Laura and Petros Vourvachis, representing a wider international team of collaborators from PRME Global Champions, also presented findings from their ongoing work on Responsible Management Education Reporting: From Transition to Transformation: Assessing SIP 2.0 as a New Standard for Responsible Management Education Reporting. With SIP 2.0 fast becoming the reference point for how institutions report on responsible management education, this was a timely and well-attended contribution — and another example of UK & Ireland members shaping standards. This also supports collaboration within the PRME Working Group on Responsible Management Education and Emerging Technologies.
Sally Chan (Leeds University Business School), Steering Committee member of the PRME Working Group on Arts for Impact delivered a paper on performance, fashion and the art of connection. If you attended PRME UK and Ireland Chapter conference at the University of Bath this summer, you may fondly remember Sally’s championing of this Working Group. She is a leading example of encouraging connections around common interests.
Reclaiming, resisting, reimagining collaboration itself
Karen Cripps was invited to co-chair a collaboration-focused workshop with Lisa Fröhlich, Chair of PRME Chapter DACH. This workshop explored collaboration across global Chapters, Champion groups and Working Groups. This was really well attended, with a vibrant conversation. The themes mapped neatly onto the conference's own framing:
Reclaim visibility of the collaborative projects already quietly running across the network, so more people can build on them rather than duplicate them.
Resist siloed working — the disciplinary, geographic and functional boundaries that fragment effort that is often already additional to people's formal workloads.
Reimagine what counts as impact, moving beyond publication metrics toward outputs that are recognised institutionally and that free up time to do more, together.
Those conversations will directly feed into the upcoming PRME Global Chapter Forum, enabling discussion of enabling further cross-regional, cross-thematic and impactful collaboration.
Congratulations to PRME DACH
Our thanks to Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich and the team at Leuphana University of Lüneburg for their hospitality, and to PRME Chapter DACH for putting together such a rich programme. The conversations have strengthened our relationships and understanding, and we look forward to what comes next for our shared community of practice.
If you'd like to hear more about any of these projects — the pedagogy competition, the SIP 2.0 research, the Working Groups, or the cross-Chapter collaboration work — get in touch, or sign up to our newsletter.
