Researcher in Focus: Professor Sandra Walklate

Posted on: 27 August 2019 by Nick Jones in 2018 Posts

Meet Professor Sandra Walklate, the University of Liverpool's Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology and recently elected President of the British Criminology Society and learn more about her research, including into violence against women and improving policy and practitioner responses to such violence.

Sandra Walklate joined Liverpool University in January 2006 as Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology. Since being at Liverpool she has been Head of Department at Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, served on the 2008 and 2014 sociology RAE and REF panels, and the ESRC Evaluation Committee. She currently holds a conjoint Professorship of Criminology at Monash University in Melbourne where she spends some of her time as a member of the Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre. She is also an Adjunct Professor School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology and a Research Associate at West Virginia University.

Since the early 1980s Sandra has been involved in researching and working with victims of crime both as an academic and as a volunteer support worker. More recently that work has been developed both theoretically and empirically through her long standing collaborative work with Gabe Mythen and Ross McGarry, colleagues here at Liverpool, to include concerns with the impact of terrorism and war and the interconnections these have with every day understandings of who we might be afraid of and why.

Answers to both of these questions are highly gendered and Sandra's current work pays particular attention to the gendered consequences of criminal victimisation focusing specifically on violence against women and improving policy and practitioner responses to such violence. Some of Sandra's recent publications can be found online here.

Sandra's current work includes being the international partner on an Australian Research Council funded grant on ‘Securing women’s lives: Preventing intimate partner homicide ‘ (2017-2020) with colleagues at Monash University and she is also a co-investigator (along with Professor Barry Godfrey) on an ESRC funded project ‘Victims' access to justice through English criminal courts, 1675 to the present. (2018-2020) led by Professor Pam Cox at the University of Essex.

Sandra has been Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Criminology (IF 2.8) for the last six years which has been demanding but hugely rewarding in understanding the changing face of the discipline. Knowledge Sandra hopes to take forward into her new role as President of the British Criminology Society (2019-2021). Of this appointment Sandra said:

“I am delighted and honoured to have been elected by the members of the British Society of Criminology to be their President. It is a privilege to represent the discipline on their behalf.

“The discipline of criminology has grown apace over the last 20 years, not only in student numbers but in the kind of research which sits within its purview.

“Steering the society and its constituency in the coming years as its members face the challenges of REF, the open access agenda (which carries significant implications for learned societies more generally), and increasing student numbers, will be paramount concerns.

“However equally important will be ensuring the society's voice is heard in criminal justice policy making circles so that such policies might be rooted in good, evidence based, sense.”

Find out more about Professor Walklate and her work on her staff page.