The start of a sea change: advancing qualitative methodologies with lived experience expertise

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

For some researchers and practitioners working in the criminal legal justice space a sea change may feel afoot. With the long overdue acknowledgment of ‘lived experience’ expertise in academic research and policymaking comes an opening up of funding streams to support research that embeds the value of lived experience into research projects. Funders and publishers of all sizes increasingly welcome applications for projects integrating lived experience to the research design, often including explicit calls to demonstrate how lived experience has been mobilised as part of the call guidelines. This panel brings together four different projects, two which received approval from leading publishers, one as a recipient of a small funding award and the other, a fully funded PhD. The speakers reflect on some of challenges encountered at interface of establishing different ways of working-thinking-being with emancipatory intent and the norms of funding-publishing-academy. We discuss emergent tensions in the respective projects working to meaningfully centre lived experience and advance ‘knowledge equity’.

Subtopic

• Topic 8: Methodologies in Criminology / Advances in Qualitative Methods (Qualitative Methods WG)

Chair

• Shadd Maruna, University of Liverpool

Individual Presentations

• Riding the waves of centring lived experience and co-production in CJS knowledge production - Donna Arrondelle, University of Southampton

• Will we ever get it ‘right’? Exploring meaningful co-production in PhD research - Danica Darley, The University of Sheffield

• Love, Solidarity, and Rejection: The Experience of Being a Peer Activist, Researcher and Co-Editor - Paula Harriott, UNLOCK

• Platforming lived experience through writing partnership - Helen Nichols, University of Hull