If you're interested in undertaking a doctorate with us, take a look at the information below which shows the work supervisors are currently supporting and what topics they're interested in working with. You can use the links to view their profiles for more information.
You can also view information about how to apply for a PhD or for a Professional Doctorate
Doctoral supervision in CASS
Dr Athanasia Chatzifotiou is currently supervising doctoral studies in the field of education. Dr Chatzifotiou is particularly interested in supervising projects on the following areas:
- Environmental education
- Education for sustainability
- Primary national curriculum
- Primary school teachers' practices
- Qualitative analysis
- Educational policies.
Dr Lesley Deacon is currently supervising doctoral work on hospital social work practice, spirituality in social work, and neurodiversity. Dr Deacon is interested in supporting doctoral work in the following areas:
- Neurodiversity
- Practice-focused research in health and social care, especially practitioner-led
- Authentic service user engagement and practice development
- Evaluation of human service organisations and service delivery
- Families’ experiences of navigating welfare systems
- Social work theory and practice with children/adults/carers
- Safeguarding children, especially at its intersection with neurodiversity
- Supporting people with complex needs
- Methodology: qualitative, specifically lived experiences, and pragmatism.
Dr Matt Durey supervises doctoral work on women’s experience of middle age and is particularly interested in supporting students in the following areas:
- Cultural and creative industries
- Postindustrial cities and culture
- Everyday experiences of cities and landscapes
- Sociologies of the everyday
- Quantitative/qualitative methods, narrative methods, ethnographic methods, complexity and realist theory and methods.
Dr Liz Henry is interested in supervising doctoral students in topics related to environmental psychology, in particular the following areas:
- Person-place relationships (e.g., place attachment, place dependence, place identity)
- Restorative environments
- Green/blue/grey spaces
- Barriers and facilitators to accessing place
- Wellbeing (theories and measures)
- Determinants of behaviour and behaviour change.
Dr Sarah Lonbay is currently supervising doctoral work that's focused on how adult safeguarding is performed with adults who lack mental capacity and work that's exploring the concept of resilience in relation to self harm. Dr Lonbay is also supervising work that's using a Mad Studies framework to explore people’s experiences of accessing mental health services and a further project which is utilising a life course approach to explore women’s experiences of midlife. Dr Lonbay is interested in supporting doctoral work in the following areas:
- Adult safeguarding and adult abuse (particularly elder abuse)
- Domestic abuse and older people
- Participation, advocacy, co-production
- Ageing and older people
- Disability
- Mental health
- Adult social care and social work
- Trauma
- Vulnerability
- Participatory research and co-production
- Creative methodologies and qualitative approaches.
Dr Bruce Marjoribanks supervises doctoral work exploring health inequalities in Ethiopia, and international student experiences. Dr Marjoribanks is interested in supervising work in the following areas:
- Sociology of education
- Internationalisation of the curriculum
- Research methods
- Multicultural and minority education
- Diversity issues
- Childhood studies.
Dr Ben Middleton supervises students exploring the link between populism and far right violence in the UK. Dr Middleton is interested in supporting work that considers:
- Counter-terrorism law and policy
- Comparative counter-terrorism studies
- Public law and constitutionalism (control of executive power, judicial review, the role of the courts)
- Police powers and human rights
- Definitions of terrorism
- Policing and security
- Protection of human rights.
Dr Jerry Pearson is currently supervising doctoral work on the rise of populism and associated links to right wing extremism. Dr Pearson is interested in supporting work that considers:
- Foreign national offending
- International criminality
- Brexit and the implications of EU exit on British policing
- Police contingency planning
- The management of serious and organised criminality
- Police critical incident management, police ethics, and counter-corruption
- Firearms command
- Inspection and governance of police forces
- Safeguarding and serious case reviews.
Dr Sheila Quaid is currently supervising work exploring domestic violence in Nigeria, integration of technology into secondary school education in British Virgin Islands UK, motherhood and academia, child health inequalities in Ethiopia, and women returning to work after pregnancy (discrimination). Dr Quaid is interested in supervising work in the following areas:
- Gender inequalities
- Domestic violence
- Motherhood
- Sociology of families and personal lives
- Culture and representation
- Same sex parenting
- Children raised by same sex parents
- Critical pedagogies in social sciences.
Dr Nicola Roberts is currently supervising doctoral work on offender desistance. Dr Roberts has a range of experience and is particularly interested in supervising work on:
- Perceptions and strategies of safety in the urban environment
- Sexual harassment and assault in public spaces
- Rehabilitation and resettlement of people convicted of domestic abuse and child sex offences
- The Probation Service and Approved Premises
- Bystander training/interventions
- Universities, students' safety, and reports of interpersonal violence and abuse
- Methodologies: evaluations of interventions, statistical analysis, Foucauldian discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, and institutional ethnography.
Dr Tom Rodgers supervises students who are exploring mad studies, cultural criminology, social media, and mediated violence/crime. Dr Rodgers is also interested in supervising work in the following areas:
- Critical/social/criminological theory
- Violence, hatred, and social harm
- Political economy
- Value and values
- Digital/social media
- Video games
- Ethnography/webnography
- Time-space diary methods (quant and qual)
- Mixed methods.
Dr Diane Simpson is currently supporting doctoral students looking at social work (in particular social justice and poverty) and also in forensic radiography. Dr Simpson is interested in supervising doctorates in the following areas:
- Social work practice (children's social care) including harmful sexual behaviours
- Academic identities
- Foucauldian theory
- Qualitative research.
Dr Angela Wilcock is interested in supporting doctoral work in the following areas:
- Domestic violence including help-seeking, love, and coercive and controlling behaviour
- Feminist methodology including emotionality and the impact on the researcher and the researched
- Offender management including criminogenic need and reducing reoffending pathways.
Dr Helen Williams is currently supervising doctoral work on the dating experiences of transwomen and on gender and race in the #metoo movement. Dr Williams is also interested in supervising qualitative doctoral work in the following areas:
- Sexual violence and witness credibility in the criminal justice system
- People with learning disabilities/neurodiversity as victims of crime and in the criminal justice system
- Sexual cultures, sexual stigma, slut shaming
- Gendered and classed identities
- Sex and relationship education
- Sex work and criminal justice.
Dr Nathan Keates (London Campus) is open to supervising doctoral work. Dr Keates is interested in supporting doctoral work in the following areas:
- Autistic mental health/distress and wellbeing
- Dementia and carers
- Neurodivergent lives and their life course
- Inclusive pedagogy.
Dr Marc Husband is currently supervising doctoral work regarding human trafficking and exploitation. Dr Husband is also interested in supervising work in the following areas:
- Youth and community work/informal education
- Music-focused informal education
- Medium theory and social media
- Critical pedagogies
- Exploitation
- Sociology of education
- Dyslexia and the educational experiences.
Dr Kevin Smith is interested in supervising doctoral students in the following topics relating to investigative psychology:
- Victim and witness interview strategies
- Victim and witness interviews
- The management of trauma in criminal investigations
- Vulnerable victims, witnesses, and survivors
- Child and vulnerable adult abuse investigations.