Clare Griffiths

Biography

Dr Clare Griffiths joined the Criminology Programme as a Teaching Fellow in 2010 before being appointed as a permanent lecturer in 2011. Prior to this Clare completed her BSc (Joint Honours), MA and PhD in Criminology at Keele. Her ESRC funded PhD thesis was entitled ‘Civilised Communities: Immigration and Social Order in Changing Neighbourhoods’.

Clare has been the Criminology and Criminology & Criminal Justice Undergraduate Programmes Director since 2022 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer from October 2025.

Research and scholarship

Clare Griffiths is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology whose research sits at the intersections of migration, policing, community, and social harm. She completed her PhD at Keele University, which examined the reception of Polish migrants in a local town. Using a mixed-methods approach, this research challenged assumptions about immigration and its links to crime and insecurity, showing instead how everyday interactions can foster civility, cohesion, and ‘civilised relationships’ across communities.

Her current research examines how national policies and public discourses - particularly around immigration and crime - are interpreted, enacted, and contested in everyday life. She is especially interested in how civil society and local communities negotiate tensions between hostility and hospitality in responses to migration, and how these shape belonging, social cohesion, and perceptions of security.

Alongside this, Clare’s research explores questions of policing, youth, and community safety, with a particular focus on trust and legitimacy. She investigates how young people and minoritised groups experience policing, and how community-based organisations can play a vital role in prevention, resilience, and social justice.

Thematically, Clare’s research addresses immigration and asylum; ‘crimmigration’ and the criminalisation and securitisation of mobility; public sensibilities around crime; police–community relations; and the role of civil society in preventing harm and fostering resilience. Methodologically, she works across qualitative, quantitative, and critical policy approaches, with expertise in interviews, narrative inquiry, survey design, and WPR (What’s the Problem Represented to Be?) analysis.

Together, her work seeks to reframe how communities, policymakers, and institutions understand and respond to complex social harms, with particular attention to the experiences of marginalised and at-risk populations.

Funded research projects include:

Teaching

Clare has been the Criminology and Criminology & Criminal Justice Undergraduate Programmes Director since 2022. She has also taught across the undergraduate and postgraduate Criminology programmes during her time at Keele. This has included teaching on modules such as Understanding Crime; Research Methods in Criminology; Migration, Crime and (In)Security; Policing and the Police, amongst others. Clare has also supervised both undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations on a range of topics.

Clare supervises PhD and ProfDoc students and is happy to be approached in relation to supervision of projects in her broad areas of research specialism.