Maggie O'Neill, Ph.D.

Life & Work

Maggie O'Neill, Ph.D., is also a Member of the HumanDHS Global Advisory Board, the HumanDHs Global Core Team, the HumanDHS Education Team, and part of the core HumanDHS Research Management Team. Maggie is particularly an Academic Advisor to our upcoming Refugees and Humiliation project. She is furthermore a Member of the Academic Board of the Journal of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (JHDHS).

Maggie O'Neill is a Reader in Criminology in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University, UK. Until 2009, she was based in Criminology and Social Policy at Loughborough University. Prior to this she worked for eleven years in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Staffordshire University and before that was ten years in the Department of Sociology at Nottingham Trent University. She co-edited Sociology (with Tony Spybey): the journal of the British Sociological Association from 1999-2002; she is a member of various professional associations including the National Network of Sex Work Projects and the British Sociological Association and British Criminology Association. She acts as a research consultant on community cohesion issues and has had commissions from the Home Office, and regional Local Authorities. Maggie researches the issue of prostitution, women's experiences, routes in to prostitution, and communities affected (since 1990) and forced migration (since 1998).

An expert in participatory action research (working with people, groups, communities to create change) Maggie has a reputation for developing innovative culture work to imagine new ways of understanding and articulating the experiences of crime and victimization, that breach disciplinary boundaries and expand and enliven the methodological horizons of cultural criminology. Her theoretical concept of ethno-mimesis (the inter-connection of sensitive ethnographic work and visual re-presentations) is a methodological tool as well as a process for exploring lived experience, displacement, exile, belonging and humiliation.

Research funding has been received from the AHRB; Joseph Rowntree Foundation; Home Office; Leicester Local Authority and Local Education Authority, East Midland Arts, Nottingham Trent and Staffordshire Universities.

Please see Maggie's blog at Policy Press.

Publications & Articles