HOPE Research

Laura is a qualitative researcher with a background in sociocultural anthropology. She uses ethnographic, participatory, and sociolegal approaches to explore how policy interventions and legislation are interpreted and implemented in practice and the real-life impacts of these processes on individuals, systems, and communities. She joined University of Manchester in 2025 as a Research Associate in The Place Project and the Post Implementation Review of the Health and Care Act 2022. In recent years, she has worked on interdisciplinary projects – spanning health and care law and policy; maternity and perinatal service improvement; public health approaches to safeguarding, counter-terrorism, and violence reduction; multi-agency partnership working; criminal law reform; and community-based environmental activism – at the Universities of Birmingham, London (SOAS; Royal Holloway), and Cambridge. She has also worked on a range of interdisciplinary, intercultural projects as a researcher, editor, and translator, and as a project manager and facilitator in higher education, publishing, and NGO settings in Southeast Asia and the UK.

Laura is a committee member of the Criminal Law Reform Now Network, and assistant editor of Indonesia and the Malay World at SOAS, University of London.