Professor Coretta Phillips

Coretta Phillips is a Professor of Criminology and Social Policy and she is a member of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology. She joined the Department of Social Policy in 2001, and she has been involved in teaching both Criminology and Social Policy in the department at BSc, MSc, and PhD levels.

Coretta serves as an Editor for Oxford University Press' Clarendon Studies in Criminology. Previously she has been on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Criminology, Punishment and Society, Race and Justice, and the Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice.

Coretta has acted as a consultant for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, UK Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Judicial Studies Board, Clinks, Howard League for Penal Reform, and the Metropolitan Black Police Association.

Expertise

Race, ethnicity and criminal justice, minority perspectives, racism, racial discrimination.

Coretta’s research interests lie in the field of race, ethnicity, crime, criminal justice and social policy. Since 2022, her major research efforts have focused on a multi-disciplinary ESRC-funded project providing the first systematic, comprehensive and historically grounded account of the crime and criminal justice experiences of Gypsies and Travellers in England since the 1960s. It comprised: a crime survey; oral histories with serving prisoners and community members; extensive archival research; and interviews with professionals in four diverse regions of England. It filled an evidence gap by shedding light on the only statutorily defined ethnic group for whom there are no national victimization, hate crime, or self-report offending data. A co-authored monograph, Gypsies and Travellers: Violent Racism, Crime, and Social Ordering in Sedentary Britain is due to be published by Oxford University Press (Clarendon Studies in Criminology) in 2028. Outputs from the project that were designed to facilitate knowledge exchange and impact among non-academic users of research can be viewed in this multimedia exhibition. For more information about the project see here.

Coretta's previous research in the UK has included work on reflexivity, epistemology and minority perspectives in Criminology and Social Policy, institutional racism, 'doorstep fraud', the use of modern slave narratives, ethnicity and social relations in men's prisons, and the role of minority ethnic professional associations in the criminal justice field. Her recent research has been entirely qualitative using ethnographic methods, life history and semi-structured interviews, photo-elicitation, and narrative methods.

Google Scholar

SP314 Ethnicity, Race and Social Policy

SP414 Ethnicity, Race and Social Policy

Coretta welcomes enquiries from potential PhD students to work on topics and methods in her areas of interest.