Research at HJL directly contributes to the organisation’s long-term strategy and vision by fostering personal, collective, and structural transformation. Our research is life-affirming, participatory, and collaborative, ensuring that it centres the voices of those most marginalised by systemic violence. This commitment aligns with HJL’s broader mission of collective liberation, which seeks to dismantle oppressive systems and build more radical alternatives. By documenting harms and proposing solutions grounded in lived experiences, research becomes a vehicle for advancing HJL’s goals of reimagining care, transforming social structures, and building community-led justice frameworks and infrastructure.
Research Declaration and Values
Our research at HJL is grounded in a commitment to nurturing diverse experiences, movements, and knowledge traditions, with the aim of supporting personal, collective, and structural transformation. We centre our work on life-affirming, participatory, and collaborative methods, ensuring that research affirms each participant’s existence and dignity.
Core values of our research include:
- Lived Experience: Our work centres the lived experiences and knowledge production of minoritised and structurally marginalised peoples. We believe that those most impacted by systemic violence should be the authors of their own narratives and central in envisioning alternatives.
- Collective Access: Research at HJL prioritises accessibility, ensuring that findings and knowledge are shared in ways that are comprehensible and useful to communities. This includes translating research into formats that help communities understand current realities and policies, while also providing visions for alternatives. Our commitment to open-source resources ensures that knowledge remains a collective, rather than extractive, practice.
- Abolitionist: Our work critiques and seeks to dismantle harmful, dominant systems (such as racial capitalism and the nation-state) while documenting life-affirming alternatives. We aim to move beyond critiques of state violence to actively support practices and infrastructures that nurture collective care and community-led justice.
- Intersectional: Our research holds the complexities of specific forms of oppression while situating them within broader contexts of racial, social, and economic justice. We remain attuned to the interconnectedness of oppressions and the possibilities for collective freedom.
- Decolonial: Honouring a plurality of knowledge systems, we draw from non-Eurocentric perspectives that include bodymind, spirit, earth, and ancestral ways of knowing. This decolonial approach affirms a more holistic understanding of knowledge production and social transformation.
- Accountability: We remain reflexive about the power dynamics within research, ensuring that our work is done “with” communities, not “over” them. This commitment to accountability is rooted in transparency and an ongoing process of learning and adjusting our practices.
- Creative and Rigorous: We resist pre-determined research methods, embracing creativity and flexibility in how we approach our work. While experimental in nature, our research remains rigorous and deeply informed by our commitment to movements for social justice. We ensure that the research process itself is part of the broader transformation we seek to achieve.
Research at HJL is, ultimately, in service to movements for collective liberation. Our work builds collective power, supports the agency of marginalised peoples, and contributes to the long-term vision of structural change.
As a research team we honour and are guided by the following lineages:
- Stephanie Davis – critical, community, and liberation psychologies; Black feminist, anticolonial, decolonial, queer and trans of colour, and disability justice theory and practice; critical pedagogies
- China Mills – Black feminist abolitionist practise and theory; disability justice; decolonial theory; crip of colour critique; scholarship on racial capitalism; indigenous research methodologies and practices; Mad studies
- Tarek Younis – Sociogenic approach to distress (Fanon/Bulhan) Critical race theory/racialisation (Gilroy/Kundnani/Goldberg/Bonilla-Silva) Double-consciousness, internalised racism (Morsi/DuBois) Socio-political dimensions of mental health (Rose/Parker) Imperialism of Western liberal approach to self/wellbeing (Bulhan/Mossad/Sheehi)
We are guided by these lineages, and from these we have developed our research values which underpin our work.
Summary of research projects
Since 2021, Deaths by Welfare has been using the process of documenting evidence of welfare state violence to build cross-movement solidarity through connecting people with lived experience of, and families bereaved by, different but connected forms of state violence.
At the heart of the work, is a timeline – a living document which aims to make visible the slow and bureaucratic violence of the State. By piecing together evidence (often publicly available but well hidden), of dispersed harms and people’s deaths, we identify patterns and strategies used over time by the UK welfare system to deny accountability for people’s deaths. This is also a timeline alive with resistance – showing creative and relentless forms of resistance from disabled people, allies and bereaved families in fighting for justice. It is deeply informed by disabled people’s expertise, knowledge, activism, and movements.
The timeline was co-created with John Pring, a disabled journalist with over a decade of experience researching the impact of state austerity on disabled people. John is Editor of Disability News Service.
We worked with Access Power Visibility collective and Door in the Wall Arts Access to create an accessible website to navigate the timeline.
To dive deeper into people’s lived experiences of the welfare system, and how these connect to other forms of state violence, we produced a podcast series available here.
Breathing Spaces: Conspiring for Health Justice in an Age of Climate Change and Pandemics
This is a participatory action research project that explores how we build capacity and infrastructure within our movements and communities for the present and future of climate change and the long age of pandemics. It also seeks to think through emergent ways of thinking and being in the world – reanimating our relationships with self, each other, land and spirit.
This research project seeks to intervene in and conspire to disrupt the coloniality of current responses to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and climate change which disproportionately impacts global majority and disabled folks. It seeks to challenge eugenicist, ableist, human-centric logics of normative (dis)order and increasing precarity, disability and death. It asks what we need to build, prototype and organise for the age of climate crisis, Covid and future pandemics and to birth anti-colonial ways of being, knowing and power.
Palestine Project: Liberal Forms of Racism in Mental Health Settings
This project investigates how the genocide in Palestine reveals the more subtle, liberal forms of racism within mental health services. By conducting interviews and engaging in policy research, we aim to uncover the liberal acceptability of racism embedded in these settings, often under the guise of care and support. This research is vital to challenging liberal racist practices, the most insidious form of racism in mental health institutions..
Mapping Project: Policing and Security in Healthcare
This mapping project examines the ways in which policing and security practices are embedded within healthcare systems. It will result in a dynamic, open-source website that visualises these connections and provides a resource for those looking to understand how healthcare—intended as a space for healing—can often function as a site of control, surveillance, and harm, particularly for racialised and minoritised communities. By making this research accessible, we aim to support movements advocating for the removal of policing and security from places of healing.
Exploring the Impact of Policing and Security on Communities
This project explores the impact of policing and security on marginalised communities. Through building networks, hosting conferences, and facilitating knowledge exchange, we interrogate the role of policing from a framework of care. The project prioritises lived experience, ensuring that the voices and knowledge of those most affected by state surveillance and policing are at the forefront.
