People - Staff

Edicleia Oliveira

Assistant Lecturer

Dr Edicleia Oliveira is a lecturer and early-career researcher in entrepreneurship. Her work focuses on women’s entrepreneurial experiences, institutional contexts, and the development of gender-sensitive policies. She combines Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis with feminist phenomenology to examine how institutional structures shape women’s situated agency within entrepreneurship.

Her doctoral research, funded by the TU Dublin Scholarship Programme, developed an evidence-based conceptual framework that expands existing understandings of the entrepreneurial journey by emphasising its non-linear, embodied, and gendered dimensions. The study contributes to inclusive entrepreneurship policy and education, and aligns with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth). Edicleia has also published in leading journals, including the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship and the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research.

A core strand of Edicleia’s academic practice centres on the development of innovative, evidence-informed approaches to teaching entrepreneurship. She has led curriculum redesign across multiple programmes, replacing traditional business plan models with competence-based, experiential, and embodied learning methods. Her teaching integrates Design Thinking, sustainability-oriented projects, gamification, scaffolding techniques, and Universal Design for Learning (UDL 3.0). She works closely with students to support the development of entrepreneurial mindsets, creative problem-solving skills, ethical reflexivity, and real-world application.

Edicleia’s work extends to practice-based initiatives in entrepreneurship education. She co-designed the Junior Climate Entrepreneurship Camp under the HEA HCI programme, mentors migrant women founders, and has led embodied entrepreneurial leadership initiatives with enterprise agencies and community groups. Alongside this, she contributed to the HEA-funded GROWTHhub project through the design of an Entrepreneurship Learning Outcomes Audit Framework, integrating the EntreComp framework to evaluate and strengthen the development of entrepreneurial competences across higher education. She continues to develop tools and methodologies that support educators in embedding, assessing, and progressing entrepreneurial competences in diverse learning contexts.