Social Justice, Identity and Empowerment
Research in this area is central to the University’s mission to advocate for and advance equality and opportunity both within our local communities and globally. With a commitment to social justice, we are responding to inequalities related to, for example, education, class, gender, disability, and income.
Advancing Social Justice, Identity and Empowerment Through Social Work Research and Practice - Dr Dan Allen
Dr Dan Allen, Principal Lecturer in Social Work, examines the statistical over-representation of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children in State Care. This award-winning research advances aversive racism theory and interdependence theory, showing how subtle, often unintentional discriminatory processes shape safeguarding and welfare decision-making. The ROMA Model, an innovative framework for restorative and anti-racist supervision that enhances cultural humility and strengthens social worker relationships with individuals, families and communities.
Dr Allen’s commitment to research-informed practice is reflected in extensive research and knowledge-exchange partnerships with Cafcass, Leeds City Council, Flintshire Council, Cheshire West and Chester, Durham Council and several third-sector organisations. These collaborations have produced practical tools for improving cultures of practice within social work and social care, alongside insights into Serious Case Reviews, domestic violence and community policing involving Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and Deprivation Of Liberty Safeguards. He has also Co-Edited two special issues, one for Critical and Radical Social Work and another for Child Abuse Review, to widen access to critical scholarship on justice, identity and empowerment.
As Director of KasKosan, a Roma charity with over three million online followers, and Chair of an Association of Child Protection Professionals Special Interest Group, Dr Allen supports community empowerment beyond academia. Working with KasKosan, he will soon launch a monthly radio show on Radio Sangam, providing a platform for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller voices, heritage and advocacy. Through this integrated body of work, Dr Allen advances the themes of Justice, Identity and Empowerment through his world leading research and practice.
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Figure 1: Dr Allen (left) with colleagues. Applying research to inform training to Best Interest Assessors across five Local Authorities in the North West
Figure 2: Dr Allen applying research to inform training to on anti-racist restorative supervision with Leeds City Council
The Poverty Research and Advocacy Network (PRAN) - Dr Natalija Atas
The Poverty Research and Advocacy Network (PRAN) is an independent, collectively run advocacy network and a valued community asset, established in June 2023 and co-founded by Dr Natalija Atas, Senior Lecturer in Community Health and Social Care within the Faculty of Education and Social Science. Open to all committed to social justice, PRAN is founded on the principle that only collective, coordinated action can effectively escalate the fight against poverty. The network has grown to more than 250 members and brings together diverse people and organisations to strengthen knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and public understanding.
PRAN provides a vibrant platform where members of the public, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, community organisations, and people with lived experience connect to exchange insights and work collectively on issues of poverty and social injustice. PRAN’s efforts centre on facilitating collaboration and knowledge exchange across its diverse members and driving advocacy that counters the stigmatising narratives of poverty that impede social progress.
The network is both interactive and dynamic, incorporating elements such as event organising, newsletters, blogs, and a podcast series. Members of PRAN have an opportunity to share their ideas and learn from the most prominent voices in the country. The network has also forged some unique relationships and collaborations.
PRAN creates inclusive spaces that empower participants to engage critically with the structural injustices that drive poverty. These activities strengthen solidarity across sectors and equip practitioners, educators, and grassroots groups with the tools, insight, and collective voice needed to challenge inequality, centre lived experience, and advance research-led approaches to social justice and local advocacy.
By uniting diverse stakeholders and promoting open, accessible knowledge exchange, PRAN demonstrates how collective learning, solidarity, and coordinated action can advance the fight against poverty and contribute to meaningful social change.
Website: http://www.pran.org.uk/
Other sources:
https://fairerhealthierliverpool.org/case-studies/the-poverty-research-advocacy-network/
Autocritical Disability Studies - Dr David Bolt
This expansive research project led by Professor David Bolt proposes Autocritical Disability Studies as a subfield of disability studies. It involves a formal coupling of critical disability studies with the research method of autoethnography. The qualitative method of the latter acknowledges a researcher’s individual experience in the most explicit of ways, from the start of the process to the finished product that reaches publication. Whereas most traditional research methods claim, or at least aspire to, objectivity, autoethnography owns its subjectivity as paramount. When researchers have direct or at least intimate individual experience of disability, the subjectivity of their research can predicate a shift in typology from critical disability studies to autocritical disability studies.
In textual and theoretical work, for example, the subfield introduces autocritical discourse analysis and autocritical disability theory to formalise the ethical and epistemological importance of disability experience. If social injustice is worsened by metanarratives of disability, among other things, autocritical disability studies responds with an empowering endorsement of personal stories. These stories may be formative, from key moments in a lifetime, identified as cultural stations of disability.
Autocritical Disability Studies is the eponymous title of a Routledge book series of which Prof. Bolt is the editor. Contributors to the subfield include an array of international and Liverpool Hope colleagues. Prof. Bolt’s monographs comprise Disability Duplicity and The Formative Cultural Identity Politics of Generation X (Bolt, 2024) and The Playground Model of Disability: Dis/honesty Tropes in Contemporary British Sociocultural Representation (Bolt, 2026).
For further information about these books, monographs by Dr Ella Houston and Dr Erin Pritchard, as well as edited volumes in the series, please see: https://www.routledge.com/Autocritical-Disability-Studies/book-series/ASHSERADS
Creative Recovery - Dr Zoe Zontou
Dr. Zoe Zontou, Associate Professor in Drama and Theatre Studies, is collaborating with the Everyman and Playhouse Theatres in Liverpool to establish a creative hub for individuals in recovery from alcohol and drug issues, offering them a meaningful platform to develop and showcase their artistic work. The project focuses on social justice and the empowerment of individuals in recovery, recognising them as artists and contributors to Liverpool’s cultural identity, challenging stigma and creating space for their creative voices. The project works in collaboration with a wide range of people and organisations across the Liverpool City Region who use the creative arts to support recovery. The initiative offers mentoring, artistic development and opportunities for public engagement, with the programme shaped by people with lived experience of recovery to ensure their perspectives guide the work. The project runs monthly Steering Committee meetings and hosts an annual showcase for established and emerging artists on the Everyman main stage, where participants present original theatre, performance, writing and visual arts. This event provides a supportive platform that celebrates artists in recovery and their creative achievements.
"Creative Recovery: The Ebb and Flow of Life, illustrated live by Louise French, Liverpool, July 2024"
Website: https://everymanplayhouse.com/join-in/community/creative-recovery-the-ebb-and-flow-of-life/
Pedagogies of Punishment - Dr John Tilson
Together with Winston Thompson of the Ohio State University, John Tillson, Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Education, is Co-PI on a project entitled the Pedagogies of Punishment. This Center for Ethics & Education funded project brings together emerging and established scholars from a range of institutions and disciplines (inter alia, education, law, philosophy, politics, psychology, and sociology) to discuss the defensibility of punishment in schools, addressing the specific complexities of two similar though distinct contexts (i.e., the US and the UK).
This shared work endeavors to establish and explore normative criteria by which to evaluate and inform decisions about school discipline policies and practices. The project webpage has links to an ongoing project blog, publications, and podcasts. Dr. Tillson has co-edited a special issue of Theory and Research in Education, and edited a volume published by Bloomsbury, Pedagogies of Punishment: The Ethics of Discipline in Education (Bloomsbury 2023). In the project's interdisciplinary spirit, his own papers and chapter have been co-written with a political theorist Winston Thompson, psychologist Laura Oxley (Cambridge), and moral philosopher Kartik Upadhyaya (Warwick) on the topics of school rules, exclusion and hypocrisy.
Dr. Tillson and Dr. Konstanze Spohrer, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies, are co-supervising a doctoral scholarship student working on the morality of school punishment with grant money from Liverpool Hope and the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.
