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Research Profile

Prof Gordon Hughes 


    • Recent Research Projects

    • - Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the Safer Communities Fund 2006-2009 (funded by the Welsh Assembly Government)
    • - Co-director of ESRC funded seminar series Rethinking community policing in an age of diversity (2005-6);
    • - The Role of the Community Safety Officer in Wales (2007, with Edwards, funded by Welsh Association of Community Safety Officers);
    • - EU funded research project, DOMUS: safe city policies in European cities (2004-5);
    • - Safer Clubbing and Pubbing in Milton Keynes: an evaluation of the drug and alcohol strategy (2002, funded by the Home Office’s Communities Against Drugs fund);
    • - Consultant to Australian Research Council Linkage project Assessment of Local Community Safety and Crime Prevention Roles in Victoria (2003-4, funded by the Australian Research Council);
    • - Anti-social behaviour and community safety in the UK (ongoing participant observation/action research with National Community Safety Network, 2005- present).

     

    • Research Programme

    • My programme of research is focused on the following inter-related issues:
    • - Comparative trends in crime control, community safety and security;
    • - Professional expertise, political agency and new community governance;
    • - The production of criminological knowledge and sociological theory.
    • For the past two decades I have undertaken a programme of comparative research on the policy and practice of community safety.  This is reflected in the series of local, regional, national and international research studies and policy evaluations undertaken since 1992.  My current projects are focused on the developing expertise and contested and uneven ‘professionalisation’ of local community safety workers across the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand and more broadly the question of assessing ‘what works’ in multi-agency preventive partnerships in the varying contexts for community safety and crime prevention work, locally, nationally and internationally.  With my colleague, Adam Edwards, I am currently engaged in research comparing crime prevention policies in different European localities. This is work we have undertaken through a research network of academics supported by the European Society of Criminology.
    • Most recently I have undertaken research and produced a policy report for the Welsh Association of Community Safety Officers (with my colleague, Adam Edwards) on the changing role of the community safety officer in Wales. This project is, to our knowledge, the first all-Wales research study of community safety work and has identified further issues for research on the implementation and evaluation of problem-oriented, evidence-based, and locally accountable strategies for community safety. Currently, we are further developing this research through a study of the interaction of professional and community intelligence in the production of annual strategic assessments for community safety partnerships in Wales.
    • I am currently a member of a team of senior academics involved in the development of a major inter-national/inter-regional research study of the local governance of crime and safety in Wales, England and Scotland (with colleagues from Edinburgh and Cardiff).  I am also one of the coordinators of the Wales Centre for Research on Crime, Community and Social Justice (CCSJ), which involves criminological researchers from HEIs across the whole of Wales and aims to build up policy relevant research capacity in Wales.
    • My forthcoming monograph, Sociology and Crime: Towards A New Criminological Imagination (Sage, 2009), explores the relationship of the production of different types of criminological knowledge to concepts and debates in sociological theory.