Dr Emma Cunningham

I am joint course leader for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of East London where I am a senior lecturer. As a working-class academic I have adopted an intersectional feminist approach to my research, teaching, engagement and impact activities which tackle some of the most urgent theoretical and empirical problems across these areas, such as how police culture remains toxic, how stop and search impacts community relations and how policewomen continue to undertake their role and responsibilities, remain resilient and stay in policing even given their own lived-experiences. At its heart, my scholarly activities are driven by a pursuit of equality, diversity and social justice – values that strongly align with work carried out in UEL.

As an innovative and creative scholar, my work has explored the history of women’s integration in policing and the arguments of sameness and difference which were used and applied to women, contributing to a deeper understanding of the challenges women in policing face and have faced. Incorporating this my research has been a trailblazer for not merely examining the lived experiences of officers, and included Freedom of Information disclosures from different police service areas. Discussion about the sameness and difference between male and female officers added a further dimension in order to explore and examine police disciplinary records and what they disclosed in terms of the types of disciplinary offences that female officers and male officers were involved in.

My work found that female and male officers were involved in different types of offences. Theoretical understandings about inequality, patriarchy and feminism allow for a deeper understanding and clearer challenge to these issues on a practical and policy level. This work has been incredibly timely given the recent Policing scandals such as the Sarah Everard case, Charing Cross, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, Baroness Casey’s Review, the CWJ Super-complaint, HMICFRS (2021), IOPC, (2022), HMICFRS (2022) on police misconduct, misogyny and racism. I have been asked by different media outlets for my expert comments for articles, TV programmes, such as Workingmums.co.uk and Saffron Cherry Productions. In working for UEL I have become involved in networks, blogs, and in writing short articles for the Sunday Times and Open Access Government articles about policing, misogyny and the toxic culture recently exposed in policing. I am pushing the field forward, asking new questions about participation, in/exclusion, and using creative methods and approaches to present a more nuanced and complicated picture of policing problems.