COLLABORATIONS
I collaborate with leading researchers, practitioners, and organisations seeking to improve communication, decision-making, and outcomes through evidence-based language analysis.
Sharon Baker
Superintendent, Avon and Somerset Police
Sharon is a senior police officer, negotiator, and co-author of our UK national guidance for policing, "Language Matters". Sharon has developed many initiatives to help victims and survivors of domestic abuse and won a Police Federation award for her work supporting officers who had been abused by domestic perpetrators.
Sharon has also appeared in a television documentary led by the Queen and is a compassionate advocate for change in how officers use language around domestic abuse.
Sharon is a trusted advisor on all aspects of policing practice relevant to our research, and her commitment to improving practice means that she also incorporates our findings in her policing work.
Michael Rowe
Professor of Criminology, Northumbria University (UK)
Michael Rowe has an international reputation for research and publications in the field of governance and accountability of police, police integrity and ethics, police culture, and the policing of sexual violence. He is currently working on policing and temporality, as well as Violence Against Women and Girls in the Night-Time Economy.
He has published widely on these (and other) topics and is co-editor of Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies book series.
Michael is my co-investigator on a British Academy funded award investigating correlations between language use and case outcomes in domestic abuse investigations in the UK and New Zealand.
Viran Wiltshire
Detective Sergeant (KPM) Metropolitan Police
Viran, a Met Police officer for 26 years, specialises in sexual offences, child protection and domestic abuse. She previously worked within the Continuous Policing Improvement Command, where she was responsible for developing, implementing and monitoring policy. She is experienced in conducting Domestic Homicide Reviews and Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews and has served as a MARAC Chair.
She is also a DA Matters Associate Trainer, trained in Trauma Impact Prevention, an 'Own My Life' facilitator and a trustee. She authored the Metropolitan Police Service Domestic Abuse employee policy and co-founded HEAL DA (Helping Employees Affected by or Living with Domestic Abuse). In recognition of her work, she was awarded the King's Policing Medal in 2024.
Like Sharon, Viran is a trusted policing advisor to my research, helping to ensure our findings are grounded in practice and supporting their translation back into policing.
Mark Farrell (PhD)
Archivist & Records Manager
Mark is an archivist and records manager, with wide-ranging experience in access to information and the role of archives in facilitating accountability, transparency, and justice. His PhD at the Dublin City University Institute of Ethics was titled ‘Accountability, Human Rights and Social Justice: Developing an Ethical Framework for Enhancing Irish Public Sector Recordkeeping’.
As co-founder and director of Ireland’s first archives consultancy company, he has established and managed projects in a range of public and private sector organisations over the last 30 years. He is also an experienced trainer and educator, contributing to accredited postgraduate programmes at University College Dublin, University of Dundee and Maynooth University, as well as CPD training in Freedom of Information, GDPR, and related topics.
Mark was an expert member of the Truth Recovery Independent Panel, where we worked on the coding and analysis of 280 recorded personal testimonies from survivors of Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries, and Workhouses in the north of Ireland. We are currently collaborating on an international project to analyse the use of harmful language in archival catalogues, with a view to developing standards and guidance for archivists and other information specialists on inclusive cataloguing practices.
Deena Haydon (PhD)
Researcher, Writer, & Children's Rights Activist
A qualified primary school teacher, Dr Deena Haydon became Senior Lecturer in Education and Childhood Studies at Edge Hill University with responsibility for research throughout the School of Education, then a senior manager for research in Barnardo’s. Since 2006 she has been an independent research and policy consultant based in the north of Ireland.
Her main areas of research and publication include children's rights, secure custody, and youth justice. She is co-author of The Illusions of Post Feminism: New Women, Old Myths (Routledge) and the forthcoming Childhood, Transition and Social Justice (Routledge).
She has extensive experience analysing children's rights implementation, working with children and young people, government departments, health and social care services, local authorities, voluntary and community organisations.
A leading authority in her field, Deena was co-author of our Independent Panel Report, ‘Treated With Contempt’, into fans’ experiences at the 2022 Champions League Final in Paris. She analysed the testimonies of children and young people who experienced negligent management and stewarding of the event, unprovoked aggressive policing, criminal assaults by local gangs and the police.
Phil Scraton (PhD)
Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, Belfast
Phil Scraton is Professor Emeritus, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast. He has held visiting professorships at Sydney, Australia, Auckland, NZ and Amherst, USA. His research focuses include: critical theory; contested deaths and State responsibility; rights of bereaved and survivors following disasters; the politics of incarceration; childhood, rights and justice.
Widely published, his books include Law, Order and the Authoritarian State (Open University Press); Childhood in ‘Crisis’? (UCL Press); Power, Conflict and Criminalisation (Routledge); The Violence of Incarceration (Routledge); Hillsborough: The Truth (Mainstream/Penguin); Childhood, Transition and Justice (Routledge).
Founder member of Inquest: United Campaigns for Justice, Phil was primary author of the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s ground-breaking report Hillsborough (2012); co-author of pioneering research into: the circumstances of the 1976-81 H-Block and Armagh prison protests; the experiences of victims/ survivors of Mother and Baby Homes/ Magdalene Laundries; police brutality at the 2022 Paris European Champions League Final.
He was awarded the Freedom of the City of Liverpool in recognition of his Hillsborough research and, having refused an OBE, in 2017 he was castaway on BBC’s Desert Island Discs.
WHO I WORK WITH
The featured organisations represent a selection of those I have worked with, or with whom I currently work
