Here you can find a selection of my longer articles and blog posts
We must confront the culture of overwork to tackle academia’s mental health crisis
June 2018
For me, as for many others at Cardiff University, the recent news coverage of Malcolm Anderson’s suicide has been a real blow. I did not know the accounting lecturer personally. The thing that was so shocking about reading the articles was just how familiar many of the details felt. I have heard numerous stories from colleagues who feel like they are barely holding on. People are struggling with unmanageable workloads and feel as though they are constantly failing.
Impostor Syndrome and the Paradox of Agency
July 2018
Like many other young academics, I remember feeling an acute sense of relief the first time I was told about impostor syndrome. Giving my underlying feelings of inadequacy a name and defining them as a syndrome made them manageable, made it slightly less likely that I was the only one who really didn’t know how to be a researcher.
Sadness and Solidarity – The strike as utopia
March 2018
The past three weeks have been amongst the most impressive of my life. The current University and College Union (UCU) strike about pensions is not the first political or social campaign I have been involved in, but it is certainly the biggest. Members of the University and College Union in 65 UK universities are striking for 14 days across 4 weeks, the longest strike action the British higher education system has ever seen. What I was least prepared for before the strike was the intensity of emotion it would trigger in me. Throughout the last three weeks I have felt a range of expected and unexpected feelings and I would like to take the two most intense ones to reflect on the strike and what is to come after.
Judging beggars is not helping them
December 2016
In today’s edition of the Guardian there is an article by Dave Hill in the Comment is Free section titled Don’t give money to beggars – help them instead. In this article Hill argues that you shouldn’t give money to people begging on the street because it harms them more than it helps them as they will probably spend it on drugs and alcohol. As far as Hill is concerned this is such an obvious argument that everyone agrees. He writes “Outreach workers know it.[That money given to beggars will mostly be used for drugs] The police know it. They are the ones who have to deal with the consequences, handling the harder cases, directing them to rehab, hoping not to have to fish a corpse out of a hostel’s bath.”
December 2013
By sticking band-aids onto the gaping wounds of social injustice we alleviate some of the most obvious symptoms of systemic violence in our society. We become part of the problem while trying to be part of the solution. This conflict is made all the more difficult by the fact that we can’t just choose not to do what we do.
‚You’re our last hope!‘ – Some thoughts on the culture of self-exploitation
July 2013
After finishing my MA in Criminology in 2011, I made a (not unexpected) discovery. “Criminologist” isn’t really a job and so there are no jobs for criminologists. I also found out that preparing for a PhD is a lot of work, but not of the kind that anyone will pay you for. I soon found a job working night shifts in a home for people with developmental and physical disabilities. I worked nights, which meant I started work at 9.30, went to bed between ten and eleven. I got up again at 5.15 and worked till 8.30, getting people up, washing, dressing and feeding them. It’s hard work that is even harder when you’ve not had enough sleep.
Wasted Potential: Towards a Criminology of the Financial Crisis
June 2013
Our failure to tackle this topic is symptomatic of a hole in the very fabric of criminology: the discipline’s failure to research and theorise those in positions of relative power. Most ‘Introduction to Criminology’ textbooks feature a chapter on how corporate crime, state crime and human rights abuse are under-researched, to then just go back to talking about drug-addicts and violent teenagers.
Thinking in the Open 