Professor Peter Somerville has a wealth of experience practising in multidisciplinary research. With psychologists and sociologists at the University of Salford on multiple exclusion homelessness research, as well as with practitioners working for homelessness organisations; Somerville has also co-edited a book (with Bosworth in the Lincoln Business School) on Interpreting Rurality (Routledge, 2013), with chapters from disciplines that include economics, social policy, criminology, tourism, business studies, history, literary criticism, and rural sociology.

Within these chapters, contributors present research across a range of subjects allowing critical reflections upon their personal and disciplinary interpretations of “rural”. This resulting volume means that chapters give an emergent sense of how the notion of “rural” changes and blurs as the disciplinary lens is adjusted. Somerville’s contribution will draw from a wide range of research including housing, community (including rural community, community enterprise, and community policing), cooperatives, equalities, homelessness, participation and social theory.

You can find out more by visiting the Rural and Regional Research blog:

Dr Lisa White’s work on state violence experienced by political detainees in Northern Ireland lies in the field of transitional justice at the intersection between criminology and politics. White’s work and original postgraduate paper, available here will be adapted and published as a sole-authored book by Routledge in early 2014. The abstract below is taken from White’s postgraduate  paper:

Using a synthesis of documentary analysis and interviews involving former
detainees, this article explores the sociology of denial in relation to
narratives of state violence which emerged from the conflict in and around
Northern Ireland. It argues that three interrelated levels of denial
described by Cohen (2001) – literal, interpretive and implicatory – can be
observed within the ‘official discourse’ surrounding the conflict, and that
these denials are experienced by former detainees in diverse and different
ways. The article contributes to the literature on state violence within the
discipline of criminology through its exploration of the lived consequences
of state denial narratives alongside former detainees who have made their
private experiences of victimhood part of a contested public history

– White, Lisa (2010) Discourse, denial and dehumanisation: former detainees’ experiences of narrating state violence in Northern Ireland. Papers from the British Criminology Conference, 10 . pp. 3-18. ISSN 1759-0043

Professor Steve McKay has an ongoing project on child maintenance (funded by Nuffield Foundation) with a research team of Stephen McKay (Lincoln University), Ms Caroline Bryson (BPSR), Professor Ira Ellman (Arizona State University) and Joanna Miles (Cambridge University)

A grant amount of £198,674 has helped the project span from November 2011 and will last until March 2014. The excerpt below is taken from the Nuffield Foundation website:

This study will assess whether the British public believes the government should require non-resident parents to pay child maintenance to support their children. It will provide the first detailed examination of how muchmaintenance it believes it should require in different family circumstances.