Brunel’s Harm and Justice Research Group is a diverse team focused on research, advocacy, and consultancy on social harm and justice, both locally and globally.
Our group unites scholars, activists, and practitioners who address harm and promote social justice. We aim to foster a critical and interdisciplinary culture in research, teaching, and community engagement. Much of our work is restorative, decolonising, anti-discriminatory, and collaborative aiming to transform scholarship, pedagogy, and practice. Our members contribute to knowledge in various ways, including through the publication of scholarly books and articles, as well as working with organisations across the sector and beyond. Much of our work has a public engagement and/or policy focus.
In addition to running regular knowledge and research exchange seminars, we meet regularly and support members through workshops and writing retreats.
Research areas
Our research covers seven main areas:
1. Critical legal, political, and criminological theory
Our researchers apply and develop critical theories to understand various types of harms, including projects on human rights mechanisms and human rights implementation and the effects of globalisation and neoliberalism on creating an anomic social environment.
2. Health, trauma, and vulnerability
Our group’s research examines harms related to health, trauma, and vulnerability. Topics include mental health, crime, and justice; gambling harms; structural violence; community activism; youth justice; vulnerable suspects and defendants.
3. Marginalisation, displacement, and exclusion
Our researchers have several projects on marginalisation, displacement, and exclusion. These include studying the effects of criminalisation of irregular migration; political hostility towards immigrants; the resettlement support for UK citizens post deportation after being imprisoned abroad, and; state co-offending that forcibly displaced an entire population. We also explore the reproduction of social inequalities in education, urban regeneration and community development.
4. Penology
Focused on sentencing, experiences of punishment, and the operation of penal institutions, our research includes studies and evaluations of Offender Personality Disorder Pathway; gambling harms and the criminal justice system; community probation hubs; resettlement reforms for short prison sentences; mass supervision and the widening of the net of punishment; the increased use of remand imprisonment and its impacts; the Probation training qualification; sentencing law and community sanctions; penal responses to young people in conflict with the law; frameworks for prevention of torture, and; interactions between international human rights law and the penal system
5. Policing and Investigations
Our members examine miscarriages of justice in relation to policing practices; the policing of sex work, mental health, and gambling; police interactions with vulnerable groups including children and neurodiverse suspects. Our members’ research also explores the role of the state in policing, security, and war.
6. Restorative and relational practices
Our projects explore the idea of transforming higher education institutions into restorative and relational organisations; the use of restorative and relational practices across the criminal and youth justice systems; the use of co-created approaches to climate adaptation, and; embedding a decolonising culture and practice in criminology specifically and academia more broadly.
7. State, corporate, and systemic harm
Our group’s research critiques social and economic systems, focusing on state and corporate harms. Topics include urban inequality, digital exclusion, and the nexus between the climate crisis and the fossil economy.