Empirical Legal Research Network Annual Lecture: 'Contingency, Creativity and Researching ‘Closed’ Environments During the COVID-19 Lockdown'

This is not a lecture about criminal justice responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, rather it concerns the methodological challenges associated with researching ‘closed’ environments during lockdown conditions and how this in turn unleashed a variety of, sometimes highly innovative, responses. For some researchers, the challenge was one of adaptation to allow existing projects to continue. Others, who wanted to explore how the criminal justice system adapted, and with what consequence, had to devise novel, robust methodologies. 

The lecture will start with a personal reflection about how my colleague Avril Brandon and I researched a book ('Minority Ethnic Prisoners and the Covid-19 Lockdown: Issues, Impacts and Implications', Bristol University Press, 2022) about the effects of prison lockdown in four jurisdictions when we could not talk to residents. A sizeable body of criminological and socio-legal work conducted during the pandemic has now been published, and a selection of  particularly innovative methodologies will then be discussed. By way of conclusion, I will argue that the necessity of imagining novel ways of undertaking empirical research should result in more methodological creativity, diversity and daring.

About the speaker

Gavin Dingwall is Professor in Law at Northumbria University and Head of Policy and Communications at the Sentencing Academy.

For event enquiries, please contact Dr Gabrielle Watson, Director of the Empirical Legal Research Network, at gabrielle.watson@ed.ac.uk

Event Link

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