Research areas

Research into care, health and wellbeing examines interactions between lived experience, policy and practice. We adopt a critical perspective on policy, service delivery and the practices of workers within statutory and voluntary sector agencies. We have a particular interest in collective action amongst service users and the contribution of experiential knowledge and lay perspectives to research and public governance.

We seek to understand the social policy issues surrounding the processes of caring, the nature and impact of interventions and the context of wellbeing. We collaborate with users, providers and academics to ensure that our research informs current social care practice. 

This research area combines critical approaches to the traditional concerns of criminology and criminal justice with research interests in social control, surveillance and security, as well as forms of deviance, protest and resistance. Thus, while we are interested in undertaking work which explores the operation of criminal justice systems, we are as often preoccupied by the recognition that such 'systems' are frequently dysfunctional and that justice may not always be their chief purpose or outcome.

We work at the intersections of culture, identity, society and space to explore how social and political phenomena are produced, experienced and felt, in order to interrogate their consequences. Our work is orientated towards issues of justice, equality, political activism and agency. We are interested in how particular power relations are formed in specific, local, national and transnational cultural, spatial and political contexts and what these may mean for our identity, our ability to influence and our sense of self.

We develop and explore contemporary, interdisciplinary, critical theory across psychology, sociology, criminology, politics and social policy, engaging in a wide variety of sociocultural 'sites' as contexts for this work including: leisure, consumption, embodiment, mediated communication, sexualities, masculinities, childhood, science, debt, mobilities, spatialities, technologies, work, the environment, and outer space. Our work exposes the mechanisms by which we are ‘marketised’ by the current political and economic rationalities and seeks to explore meaningful, ethical, just and sustainable ways of living our lives.