Emeritus Professor

MA (Warwick) CQSW (CCETSW) PhD (Warwick)

WCE1.08, Centre for Lifelong Learning, Westwood Campus

C.Harrison@warwick.ac.uk

+44 (0)24 7652 3541

Degree Courses Taught
MA Social Work
MSc Community Child Health

Profile

Until 2021 Christine Harrison was Professor of Social Work in the Centre for Lifelong Learning. As a qualified and experienced social worker, she had a long history of co-ordinating and teaching child care and child protection social work at qualifying and post-qualifying levels for the previous 30 years. She also regularly taught on programmes for other professionals, including health professionals, in Warwick Medical School and elsewhere. Over recent years, she has participated in social work teaching at qualifying and post-qualifying levels, and other forms of pedagogy, in Iceland, Australia, Jordan, Taiwan, the US, and China. As a Social Work Course Director and Social Work Lead for a number of years, she was responsible for implementing new regulations in social work education and designing courses (including most recently the social work degree apprenticeship) that met General Social Care Council/Social Work, England requirements.

Christine has also undertaken significant roles at departmental, institutional, and international levels in CLL, and previously as Head of the School of Health and Social Studies (SHSS). She regularly contributes to external and overseas undergraduate and post graduate University programmes. For example, as Visiting Professor at the University of Babes-Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

She has considerable experience in doctoral supervision, having supervised 17 students to successful completion and she continues to undertake PhD examination on an internal and external, national and international basis. She has supervised ESRC and collaborative studentships, PhDs by published work and students undertaking fieldwork outside the UK. Students have been from a range of theoretical backgrounds and have adopted diverse qualitative and mixed methodologies. She has exemplary success rates (all completions have been successful with only minor amendments). Notably, candidates have come from Canada, Jordan, Iceland, China, Pakistan and Zambia; all have undertaken research about sensitive and difficult issues with hard to reach participants.

Like her teaching, Christine’s research profile relates to extending understanding of physical, emotional and sexual violence towards women and children from a feminist and intersectional paradigm, and the issues this raises for promoting their safety and wellbeing. Research in relation to child contact and domestic violence led to participation the All Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic Violence and has influenced practice in the Family Courts. She is a member of an international groups about child homicide.

This activism has continued since her retirement and Christine was second author (with first author Professor Ravi Thiara, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick) of a literature review published in 2021 by Women’s Aid, England, Reframing the links: Black and minoritised women, domestic violence and mental health.

She participated in a European project, Growing Up Free of Violence and Abuse, that (as one of its work packages) produced a set of teaching and learning resources and handbook.

Christine Harrison was recently appointed as a Director of STAMP: Theatre and Media Productions CIC, which develops new theatrical and digital productions based on original, usually, qualitative research. She is also a Director of Murray Hall Community Trust, which provides a diverse range of community services in the Tipton, West Midlands.

Recent Publications

Thiara, R. and Harrison, C. (2021) Reframing the Links: Black and minoritised women, domestic violence and mental health, Bristol, Women’s Aid England.

Thiara, R., Chung, D. and Harrison, C. (eds) (forthcoming) Women, children and post-separation violence: It’s never over, London, Routledge.

Thiara, R. and Harrison, C. (2016) Safe not Sorry: Supporting the campaign for safer child contact. Key issues raised by research on child contact and domestic violence, Bristol, Women’s Aid.

Harrison, C. and Thiara, R. (2014) ‘I feel privileged to have done it and bereft it has finished’. An evaluation of the Gateway Programme, University of Warwick, Centre for the Study of Safety and Wellbeing.

Harrison, C. and Thiara, R. (2012) ‘ Children and young people affected by domestic violence: the role of schools in promoting safety, wellbeing and protection’, in Purdy, N. (ed) Pastoral Care 11-16: A Critical Introduction, London, Bloomsbury Academic

Harrison, C. (2008) ‘Cyberspace and child abuse images: a feminist perspective’, Affilia

Harrison, C. (2008) ‘Implacably hostile or appropriately protective? Women managing child contact in the context of domestic violence’, Violence Against Women

Harrison, C. (2005) Damned if you do and damned if you don’t? The contradictions between private and public law in responding to children living with domestic violence’ in Humphreys, C. and Stanley, N. Domestic Violence and Child Protection: Directions for Good Practice