Law School PhD student wins Valerie Karn Prize 2016

12 April 2016

Jennifer Harris, a PhD student at the School, has won the Valerie Karn Prize for the best housing-related paper by an early career housing academic.

Jennifer's paper, 'The Digitisation of Advice and Welfare Benefits Services: Re-imagining the Homeless User' was described as;

"an original, engaging and thoughtful contribution to the field, and a deserving winner of the 2016 prize.”

Jennifer has been working alongside Professor of Social-Legal Studies, Morag McDermont at the University of Bristol on an ERC funded research programme ‘New Sites of Legal Consciousness: A Case Study of UK Advice Agencies’. The project aims to investigate ways in which third sector advice agencies are becoming new sites for the emergence of legal consciousness.

Jennifer's research investigated Shelter as an example of an organisation originally established to campaign on issues of homelessness but which now also provides advice services. She will receive her prize at the HSA conference in York on the 6 April.

Further information

The Housing Studies Association introduced the Valerie Karn prize in 2013 for best early-career paper. Valerie was a housing researcher of great compassion and conviction. She believed in the power of research to challenge and change policy by exposing the injustices of life in urban society. She was also a passionate advocate of community engagement and action.

The ERC research programme 'New Sites of Legal Consciousness: A Case Study of UK Advice Agencies' was recently the subject of a workshop that took place at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law.

For more details of the New Sites of Legal Consciousness research see: www.bristol.ac.uk/law/research/centres-themes/aanslc/.