pathway: Social Policy

My research will be based on case files over a 120 year period, exploring change and continuity in social work responses to male violence, attribution of agency in and responsibility for protecting children and the influence of first and second wave feminism. I want to reflect on social work encounters as gendered spaces in which female workers traditionally laid claim to expertise on the basis of maternalism and in which working class women continue to work a ‘third shift’, managing the risks and opportunities of child protection interventions. What can contemporary social workers learn from the history of their profession? How can history become a resource in work with women who have social workers involved in their lives?

Despite representing a mere 13% of the Italian population, immigrants make up 32,5% of its prison population. I will be examining the reasons behind this overrepresentation, a subject that has received scant academic attention hitherto. An overwhelming focus on immigration detention has, in fact, left the criminal prosecution of migrants largely overlooked. Using participatory methodologies, I therefore aim to develop an appropriate information base, providing a multiperspectival and intersectional account of the relationship between migration, individuality, and criminal justice, and assessing the potential contribution of the criminal justice process in such overrepresentation and the production and entrenchment of social harm.

Existing research indicates that menstruation stigma is widespread and problematic for young people of all genders.

My research involves understanding the messages young people receive about menstruation from different sources, including: advertisements, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and families. The project will explore how young people position themselves, and menstruation, in relation to dominant menstruation discourses.

Findings from this research will provide insights into stigmatising menstruation discourses and how young people respond to them. I hope findings will help education policy-makers and practitioners to structure and deliver menstruation education in RSE.

My research will examine the impact on retributive justice outcomes of victim participation, through legal representation by the Office for Public Counsel for Victims (OPCV), at the International Criminal Court. Restorative justice appears to be the focus of research in this area to date, however I would like to move beyond emotional or moral justifications for victim participation and explore the function served by the OPCV to both notions of justice and truth within the court space.

My project is concerned with the experiences and treatment of those incarcerated within women’s prisons across Scotland, Ireland, England & Wales. A history of poor mental health is one of the most common shared experience in prison (Angiolini, 2012). Despite this, mental health within prisons remains the most seemingly intractable issues. This research aims to examine whether ‘gender sensitive’ thinking should feed into penal design and policy, a gender responsive approach is one that aims to reflect – through design and services – the realities of women’s lives, addressing various social and cultural factors and the pathways that lead them to criminality.

Housing policy and intergenerational fairness.