Lorraine Green

Lorraine studied for a degree in Social Policy/Administration at the University of Cardiff in the 1980s because of her interest in social justice and equality. Then, after working in social care with adults and children with learning disabilities in Wales for two years within a city wide innovative ‘normalisation’ project (1984-1986), she undertook a professional qualification and a Master’s degree in Social Work at the University of Birmingham (1986-1988). Following this she worked for approximately four years in child protection and mental health social work in Salford.

In 1993/4 Lorraine changed career trajectory to research and higher education and worked as a research assistant on a large-scale health care evaluation project based at Southbank University. In 1994 she was offered a funded research studentship at Huddersfield University and undertook a sociology PhD which explored and analysed the sexuality, sexual abuse and exploitation issues which affected ‘looked after’ children living in residential care settings. Between 1998 and 2000 she worked as a research fellow in the Centre for Applied Childhood Studies within Huddersfield University, managing, coordinating and evaluating a European research project assessing the balance between legal intervention and therapeutic support for sexually abused children in three European countries.

In the early 2000s (2000-2003) Lorraine worked as lecturer/senior lecturer in Sociology at Sheffield Hallam University. From 2003 to 2013 she was a lecturer in social work at the University of Manchester and between 2013 and 2016 she was employed as an assistant professor in Social Work at the University of Nottingham. In 2017 she took up a post as senior lecturer in social sciences here at Edge Hill University, returning to her sociological and social policy roots.

Lorraine is therefore a very experienced cross-disciplinary academic, having been in higher education for well over twenty years and having taught, researched and published on many different topics over this time. Her key research interests are sociology of age and the life course, sociology of the body, and the sociology of childhood, in particular children in difficult circumstances, ‘looked after’ children and gender, sexuality, sexual abuse and children. Lorraine also acted as an expert academic witness on a Dutch governmental committee in 2013 which was charged with investigating the sexual abuse of children in residential care in Netherlands between 1945 and 2010. Lorraine has done much undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in sociology, social policy and social work. She is an enthusiastic, imaginative and diligent lecturer, committed to supporting her students reach their full potential. Furthermore, she has acted as an external assessor and validator on MA programmes in other universities. She has also internally and externally examined and supervised a number of successful sociology and social work PhD students. She would welcome discussions with potential PhD applicants who feel they could benefit from her supervision and she is skilled in qualitative research, particularly sensitive topic research.