Research Interests
- Critical Victimology
- Criminal Exploitation
- Youth Justice
- Trauma-responsive interventions with children and young people
- Vulnerability
- Participatory methods and co-production
- Intersectional feminist research methods
My main areas of research interest are victimology, criminal exploitation, and youth justice. My research uses a variety of qualitative methods, including observations and semi-structured interviews. I am particularly interested in intersectional, critical, and participatory approaches to applied research that seeks to promote equality and social justice.
Currently, I am working on developing articles based on my PhD research, a qualitative study of child criminal exploitation (CCE) in the context of county lines drug markets in the UK. During my PhD, I worked with young people involved in county lines drug distribution, police, and youth offending service staff to explore the processes by which young people come to claim or reject the ‘victim of exploitation’ label, as well as the processes by which their status as victims emerges, or fails to emerge, within the youth justice system. This research provides crucial insights into young people’s own perspectives on exploitation and victimisation, taking the first steps towards establishing a much-needed youth-specific subfield within critical victimology.
I am also beginning further research into processes of victim identification in cases of criminal exploitation more broadly. Using a combination of observations and interviews, I will examine the roles that interactions and relationships between potential victims, police, court staff and other key individuals play in determining whether individuals are identified as victims of criminal exploitation, coerced into committing offences, or criminalised as perpetrators of crime. In doing so, I plan to realise the power of Relational Sociology, a paradigm encompassing methodological approaches that take interactions as a central focus of sociological analysis, as a powerful tool for the study of victim identification.
Alongside this, I am also working as part of an interdisciplinary team at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge and the Department of Law and Criminology, Royal Holloway to evaluate the use of trauma-responsive interventions with children and young people.
I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I lecture on the paper ‘Foundations in Criminology and Criminal Justice’ and supervise on the paper ‘Criminology, Sentencing and the Penal System’ at the Institute of Criminology. I also teach on research methods with participants described as “vulnerable” as part of the Social Sciences Research Methods Programme.
2019-2020: Research Network Award, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge.
2018-2021: Doctoral Training Partnership PhD Studentship, Economic and Social Research Council and Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
2017: Hazeltine Fellowship, Brown University.
2015-2017: Graduate Programme in Development Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University.
2016: Halperin Memorial Fund Award, Society for Economic Anthropology.