Biography
I have been a lecturer in Criminology since 2018, and joined Edinburgh Napier University in December 2020, having previously worked at University of the West of Scotland. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and have significant experience teaching in research methods, as well as on a wide range of criminology modules. At ENU, I am the module leader for the second year Quantitative Research module - and contribute to other modules including Penology and Cybercrime. I am also the Deputy Programme Lead for the Masters in Applied Criminology and Forensic Psychology programme, and the module leader for the Dissertation.
My PhD, undertaken at the University of Glasgow and completed in 2019, explored the stories people told about their attempts at desistance (i.e. moving away) from offending, and its relationship with recovery from trauma and substance use . I have published multiple articles related to desistance and recoveries, and my article on the value of 'bearing witness' to desistance won the Probation Journal's prize for their best paper of 2016.
I am particularly interested in the harms experienced by people who have been repeatedly criminalised (often described as 'persistent offenders', although I tend to avoid this term). I am also interested in how different contexts shape the ways in which behaviours come to be seen as crimes (or not), and what this means for understanding and supporting desistance. One of the ways in which I am currently taking this forward is as Co-Investigator on a Carnegie Trust (Scotland) funded project with Dr Shane Horgan which looks at desistance from cyber-dependent crime. This project explores how people's involvement in 'hacking' (legal, illegal and somewhere in between) changes over their lives, and how they narrate these changes.
Before joining academia I worked for a number of years in the voluntary sector, including within prisons undertaking housing support work, and latterly as Director of Research and Development at Revolving Doors Agency, where I worked on NHS England's liaison and diversion programme for people with mental health problems and learning disabilities in the criminal justice system. I have also served on the boards of a number of organisations working on issues related to criminal justice and immigration detention.