Funder: AHRC
Awarded: £4.1 million
Duration: May 2024 to October 2030
Staff involved: Gráinne McKeever, Eugene McNamee, Mark Simpson, Ciara Fitzpatrick, Gillian Kane, Esther McGuiness, Daniel Philpott.
Project leads: Lydia Hayes and Helen Stalford, University of Liverpool.
Description
Ulster University is a leading partner in a new £5.8m Centre for People’s Justice, which includes a £4.1m investment by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council. The Centre is a coalition of 45 organisations from community, business, philanthropic, cultural, artistic, charitable, legal, government and university sectors. It is anchored at Liverpool Law School, but hosted jointly with Ulster and with the Universities of Glasgow, London, Sheffield, Swansea and Wrexham. The Centre brings together world-leading expertise in research about children; employment, welfare and care; corporate social responsibility; and reducing violence and conflict across society.
The Centre’s university partners are home to leading UK law clinics, including our multi-award winning Ulster University Law Clinic, where practitioners and law students provide free legal advice, information and representation. The Centre will work with law clinics to explore how the public could be better served by the justice system, better supported to access justice, and better informed about their rights.
The Centre has been designed in response to the AHRC’s call for research to address a lack of public trust in legal and social institutions as well as widespread public perceptions of a lack of accountability across the public and private sectors. It will partner with communities to develop research questions and design research projects. The research projects will use non-traditional methods such as arts and creative approaches that are readily accessible and help foster trust. Centre funding will be used to support and train communities to gather data, to review the research while it is in progress, and to help research findings to be put into practice for positive, lasting impacts.
