I have been at the University of Bristol since 1993, and a member of the Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice, and the Bristol Research Group on Crime and Harm. Beyond the School I am member of the Bristol Poverty Institute, the Faculty Research Group on Gender, and was one of founder members of the Bristol Research on Female Genitial Cutting. I support the activities of Bristol University Press as Academic Editor for Criminology, and serve as Consulting Editor for Justice, Power & Resistance.

Since the late 1990s, I have been part of a group of academics developing zemiology - a new disciplinay area within the social sciences focused on social harm. In 2004, with my co-editors (Paddy Hillyard, Steve Tombs and David Gordon) we published Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously (Pluto Press) which laid down the foundations of this new approach. Currently, I co-edit the Bristol University Press (BUP) Book Series Studies in Social Harm and co-ordinate the activities of the Working Group on Social Harm for the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control.

My career over the last 25 years has focused on researching two broad areas : poverty, social exclusion and inequality; and crime, harm and criminalisation, and their overlaps. I have worked on three of the four national poverty surveys to be ever undertaken in Britain (the 1990 Breadline Britain Survey and the 1999 and 2010 Poverty & Social Exclusion Surveys), and have special interest in gendered poverty and inequalities within the household. More recently my work has focused on state responses to a) female genital cutting and its impact on marginalised and vulnerable communities b) crimate and environmental protest