News & Events

Between 12-15 January 2026, the team, advisory board and stakeholders from university and charity sites worked together to co-test and develop a Compassionate Curriculum. This curriculum has a simple aim: to make universities and workplaces more accessible, humane and less excluding for people with convictions as they enter education and employment. Huge thanks to Dominique, Diane, Sian, Paula, Melanie and Emma for facilitating and to UKRI and ARU Social Sciences Research Laboratory for funding the event.

The seeds of the Compassionate Curriculum were planted between 2019 and 2024, when artist Melanie Crean worked with people in prison to create A Machine to Unmake You. The project facilitated incarcerated people to tell their own stories and design their own systems of care. People explored what it could look like to return home safely and with dignity. The project led to a public gallery exhibition and the start of a working group, who began designing a support system that could one day be tested and put into action.

Collective imagination comes with a responsibility to carry ideas forward and fight for them to become real. This 3.5 day learning in partnership event – initiated by Melanie Crean and our Co-Investigator Emma Murray – therefore brought together two universities and a community-led charity to co-develop, test and develop some support system, or ‘curriculum’ resources. This step honours the commitment made to people who co-developed the idea inside prison.

The curriculum starts by naming the systems that cause harm, such as racism, sexism and ableism, then moves into strengths-based tools that can help people support one another. In the final section, participants look at how people are represented and practice creative problem-solving through storytelling and future-building exercises. It is being developed as an open, flexible, living curriculum, meant to grow and change as future facilitators adapt it to meet the needs of their own communities.

Over the course of the 3.5 days, those developing the curriculum came together for a participatory skill-share of community-led and design based activities. Rather than presenting a finished version of the curriculum, this gathering took the form of a teach-in: a collaborative learning space where facilitators from different sites (universities and charities) experienced, practiced and reflected on its core approaches.

Each of the days were anchored in one of the curriculum’s key pillars: Beloved Community, Restorative Practice, and Futuring. Together, these pillars invited participants to explore relational learning, repair and collective imagination as tools for systemic change. The final half-day was devoted to shared reflection, integration and after-care, creating space to process, rest and look ahead together.

The gathering was an invitation to co-create something thoughtful, responsive and alive through shared intention, creativity and care. Participants left equipped to translate some of the curriculum’s practices into their own institutional and community contexts. Our design partner, Melanie Crean from The New School, New York, will now develop a visual, design based resource, so that the materials can be shared more broadly and our ‘legacy leaders’ can embed practices within communities. Watch this space!

^{At the start of December, Emma, Paula and Gill attended the very first “Becoming an Imagination Activist” weekend training at Hawkwood College, Stroud. Led by Phoebe Tickell, they embarked on an immersive journey of the imagination, learning new techniques for imagining different futures.}

Together we imagined a future world where prisons had been closed and were now places of dark tourism. The revenue funds healing circles and community learning spaces where skilled healing practitioners take a restorative approach to harms. These places are based in nature, connecting people to their environment. As a result, people feel they belong and take care of these places. Love is now one of the most important lessons taught in schools. People master empathy, self regulation and care for self and others. Every street and locality is responsible for the people they live alongside. Local harms are addressed by collective healing circles, where people decide together what repairs are needed. This includes harmful business practices. Those neighbouring the businesses vote and hold leaders accountable.

Our fellow activists reimagined a range of other beautiful futures, including a future education system designed around diverse needs and strengths, future cities which prioritise human and non-human wellbeing, and future food and energy systems focused on sustainability and ethics.

These techniques and practices will be incorporated into forthcoming future-focused work on the project.

Members of the Experience for Justice Collective (E4J), a key partner in Imagining Possible Futures, gathered at the University of Liverpool for a two-day workshop to shape a shared research agenda and spark momentum for a major community-led research proposal.

4–5 November 2025

Building on earlier gatherings, including the inaugural Sheffield symposium (2023) and E4J presentations at the British Society of Criminology conferences (2024 and 2025), the workshop explored research priorities related to participatory and coproduced criminal justice research.

Participants worked collaboratively to refine the group’s research ambitions and priorities. Sessions included short presentations, group discussions, and thematic exercises designed to strengthen shared principles and develop plans.

Guest contributor Emma Murray (Imagining Possible Futures and Anglia Ruskin University) shared insights on developing imagination based work with key stakeholders. Collaborators reflected on future possibilities for community-driven research and explored funding and infrastructure support.

Outcomes

The workshop:

• Agreed a set of shared priorities and broad research questions.
• Mapped potential funding routes and next steps for proposal development.
• Strengthened the Collective’s capacity and networks for advancing its research agenda.

E4J will continue this work through follow-up meetings in 2026.

In September 2025, Dr Gill Buck spoke at an international event, co-facilitated by Sr Caroline Acha, Coordinator, Victim Offender Prison Care Support (VOPS), Cameroon.

Gill presented a history of lived experience led criminal justice in the UK and Ireland, informed by the historical work from the Imagining Possible Futures study. She then focused on empirical evidence of peer mentoring in a UK context.

The event was attended by people who live and work in prison in Cameroon. The discussion explored ways that peer mentoring could work in the local context, in ways that ensure people are well trained, supported and safe in their work. Resources were shared regarding different kinds of training provision, empirical evidence of UK schemes and restorative approaches to re-entry post imprisonment.

📖You can access Gill’s open access publications on peer-mentoring here.

📚 More open access resources on Lived Experience Criminal Justice research are available here.

On Friday 19th September Paula, Kemi and Gill spoke at an event hosted by Penal Reform International in Amsterdam. The discussion aimed to explore and advance the meaningful inclusion of people with lived experience in prison reform efforts, in line with international human rights standards.

Gill drew on historical research by the research team to outline the long history of criminalised people shaping penal reform. She also introduced the evidence base for peer supported provision in contemporary justice systems.

Kemi talked about the therapeutic nature of her work with Reformed CIC, the discrimination that she faced as a Black woman coming out of prison, and how despite the diversity of people in prison, a driving connective thread is poverty. Kemi advocated support that is therapeutic and empowering, not just transactional.

Colleagues Scott, Donna and Dwayne provided co-constructed definitions, highlighted the importance of inclusive education and research, and the need to meaningfully include people who indirectly experience criminalisation including the children of people who go to prison.

Paula summarised the group’s contributions, locating them within a UK context of lived experience activism, before opening dialogue with the audience.

Thanks again to Dwayne Antojado for facilitating this work and Penal Reform International for being wonderful hosts.

👉 Watch the event here: https://lnkd.in/eZUzTp4H

In September 2025, team members attended the European Society of Criminology conference in Athens, Greece.

Gill Buck, along with Professor Ben Crewe from the University of Cambridge, were invited to an ‘Author meets Critic’ session. They responded to the excellent book ‘Prisoner Leaders‘, by Paula Harriott and her colleague Marion Vannier, frrom the University of Manchester.

Image: Paula Harriott with the Prisoner Leaders book.

The book examines prisoner leadership, including its qualities, conditions, and potentials, through co-authored chapters by academics and those with lived experience. In doing so it challenges assumptions about leadership while addressing themes such as gender, race, drugs, violence, work, and faith.

Critics praised the book for centering the voices of hidden prisoner leaders, highlighting their skills, resilience, and contributions to prison communities, while also noting its impact in policy spaces, including the UK parliament. They also raised questions about transparency in collaborations and deeper engagement with prisoner writings and historical traditions of prisoner-led reform.

The session proved a useful forum to critically reflect on a text closely aligned with our own research aims, and to share some of our own emerging findings on the history of prisoner activism.

Image: Gill Buck and Paula Harriott in Athens.

📣In September 2025 our research partners Tasha and Kemi from Reformed Development will launch a new empowerment programme. The Mindset Programme is aimed at women with convictions. It will run for 12 weeks from 3rd September and focus on:

✨️Employability.
✨️Goal Setting.
✨️Increased self-belief and confidence.

To register your interest, visit: https://www.reformed16.com/mindset