Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Bex O'Higgins
Lecturer
Rebecca 'Bex' O’Higgins (she/her) is a Lecturer in Technological Innovation and Enterprise at Leeds Business School, Leeds Beckett University. Her main areas of research interest, activism and public speaking are in Digital equity and identity, innovation, enterprise, and employability.
A qualified makeup artist, product and digital project specialist, Bex retrained in digital marketing with CIM and later attained an MBA (Executive) with distinction. She has translated her skills for over a decade, representing some of the biggest beauty brands in the world from Victoria’s Secret to YSL Beauty and MAC Cosmetics, in Dublin, Vancouver, London, and Leeds. This supported client facing digital first campaigns and solutions both client and agency side while in industry.
Bex contributes to industry discourse and discussion, she has been invited to the BSA Annual Conference 2023 as a Chair and co-presenter, as a panellist for the AI Show Leeds 2023, as a panellist for the discussion inspired by The British Library and Alan Turing Institute’s Living with Machines project, in partnership with AI Tech North UK entitled, 'The role of AI in Creative and Cultural Industries'. Furthermore she has spoken at the Leeds Digital Career Festival about transferable skills, at the UKREiiF Innovation as a panel member, at the Northernlands 4 showcase discussing 'Inclusion by Design', and at the BIPC Leeds X British Library Startup Panel as a speaker.
Bex is undertaking a PhD to understand the unknown impact of digital profiles on perceived digital equity and government support service accessibility, specifically for disability and Job Centre services across the UK.
Current Teaching
- H4 Marketing Data & Analytics UK & Vietnam
- H5 Web and Social Media Analytics
- H7 Social Media Marketing & Management
- H6 Entrepreneurship in a Challenging Global Economy
- H6 Business Strategy
- H6 Consultancy Project
- H4 Business Venture Creation
Research Interests
Bex's current research is to understand how public and private organisations perceive, engage and action their definition of digital equity, digital identity, artificial Intelligence, and machine learning using data when creating services.
This research will contribute to identifying gaps driven by semantic misinterpretation (Floridi, 2008) and heteroglossia (Seargeant and Tagg, 2014) between organisations which unknowingly impacts users of services and collectively society on a national and international scale.
Ask Me About
- Digital Equity
- Digital Inclusion
- Business
- Computing
- Consumers
- Creative technologies
- Diversity
- Equality and inclusion
- Ethics
- Marketing
- Project management
- Social Media
- Web design