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 to address harm and promote social justice, aiming to foster a critical and interdisciplinary culture in research, teaching, and community engagement. Much of our work is restorative, decolonsing, anti-discriminatory, and collaborative aiming to transform scholarship, pedagogy, and practice. The Harm and Justice Research Group aims to create a supportive, collaborative research environment for addressing harm and fostering social justice that encourages collaborative knowledge creation and exchange.
In addition to running regular knowledge and research exchange seminars, we meet quarterly to discuss strategy 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; necropolitics and necroresistence, 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; the impacts of COVID-19 responses on marginalised communities, and; trauma of men involved in street violence and criminality.
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, street crime, sex work, and the marginalisation of Gypsy and Traveller communities.
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; sentencing law and community sanctions; 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. Our members’ research also explores covers 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 justice system; 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.