Erin is a researcher and practitioner with interests and experience in prisons, prison theatre, care and care aesthetics, neoliberalism, and gender and incarceration.
Prior to undertaking her PhD, Erin worked as an arts practitioner in justice settings, running theatre programmes and poetry and visual art workshops in prison and probation settings. She uses this background as an arts practitioner in both research methods and dissemination.
Erin has also worked for the Prison Advice and Care Trust (Pact) delivering groupwork programmes and supporting incarcerated men and women with separation from their family and loved ones. During this time she presented a number of conferences on women, family and justice and has written reflectively on the role of Family Engagement in caring for incarcerated people.
Erin joined LJMU from the University of Surrey where she was a postdoctoral researcher on the ESRC funded project Doing Porridge: Understanding women’s experiences of food in prison. Here, she used her prison experience and her arts background to carry out fieldwork in women’s prisons and coordinate art workshops which fed into an art exhibition entitled On My Plate which featured artwork from people incarcerated in women’s secure environments around the theme of ‘Taste’.
In 2022 Erin completed her PhD entitled Performing Neoliberalism: Stories of care, conformity and resistance within contemporary prison theatre. This was a narrative study which utilised Erin’s experience as a prison arts practitioner to explore the impact of neoliberal on experiences of delivering and participating in prison theatre, and the role of care in prison arts. She is currently working on a monograph based on this study.

Degrees

2022, Edge Hill University, United Kingdom, PhD

Academic appointments

Lecturer, Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University, 2023 - present
Research Fellow, Sociology, University of Surrey, 2021 - 2023
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Applied Health and Social Care, Edge Hill University, 2018 - 2021