Associate Professor (Contextual Safeguarding)
| Posting date: | 15 July 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £59,139 to £66,537 per year |
| Additional salary information: | Pro Rata |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 14 August 2025 |
| Location: | Durham, County Durham, DH1 3LE |
| Company: | Durham University |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 25000654_1752590020 |
Summary
For over a decade, the Contextual Safeguarding Programme at Durham University (previously at the University of Bedfordshire) has been at the forefront of reforming safeguarding systems, to promote the welfare of young people in places where they spend their time. The Contextual Safeguarding Programme is part of Durham's Sociology Department whose members, postgraduate researchers, and students collectively develop 'sociological imagination' and apply it to contemporary processes and issues. These include social inequality and its implications for social mobility, education and health; violence, abuse, and the role of help-seeking and state responses. The Department was ranked 1st for Criminology in the Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024 and ranked 4th for impact in REF 2021.
In September 2025 the Contextual Safeguarding programme will formally be established as an interdisciplinary research centre - the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding (GCCS). The GCCS, led by Durham's Sociology Department, Business School and School of Education, will bring together departments across the four faculties of the University to: transform how societies understand and deliver services that safeguard young people beyond their homes; create systems that look beyond the capacity of parents to protect children; and build sustainable partnerships in which safeguarding is truly everybody's business. This is not a Centre simply focused on researching and improving existing safeguarding practices; it is instead committed to a radical transformation in how safeguarding is conceptualised, studied, and practiced, and by whom. The Centre will achieve this by building a critical interdisciplinary effort to cement an emergent field of research. It will implement that research in collaboration with others to reform policy and legal frameworks, and the organisational practices, that govern the provision and evaluation of services around the world. It will scale that implementation through commercial partnerships with industries beyond traditional safeguarding partnerships; providing various routes to learn about Contextual Safeguarding that transcends sector boundaries. To establish the GCCS a number of new academic and professional support service roles are being recruited, to join the existing programme team.
To assist in this process, the Department of Sociology at Durham University seeks to appoint three talented individual to the role of Associate Professor - each on a 0.5 FTE basis. Each postholder will hold leadership responsibility for one of the three GCCS Workstreams, in collaboration with either Law, Business or Education departments. One of the Associate Professors (Sociology) will lead on the development of the research strategy and associated workstream, one on the implementation strategy and associated workstream, and the third will hold Deputy Director responsibility for the GCCS, including leading on the GCCS dissemination strategy. All three roles, regardless of their leadership responsibility, will play an active role in the development and management of research projects within the GCCS, representing the GCCS via external engagements and citizenship roles, contributing to postgraduate and CPD learning opportunities that will contribute to the GCCS sustainability plan, and mentoring/supervising centre staff.
We welcome applications from those with research and teaching interests in the field of Contextual Safeguarding specifically, as applied to social work, voluntary sector or education settings; and are particularly eager to hear from applicants with public-facing reputations associated to Contextual Safeguarding and with extensive experience of using the concept in multiple research and teaching activities.
The Associate Professors, like other GCCS staff, will not be required to spend extensive amounts of time in Durham, given that many centre activities are taking place in multiple locations and online. Due to the reach and scope of the Contextual Safeguarding programme many GCCS members work to a hybrid working model, with research underway in various part of the UK as well as via online data collection methods. Travel for research and citizenship duties are relatively frequent, and are reimbursed. Travel to Durham for compulsory departmental meetings on a termly basis (twice a term), will not be reimbursed with Durham being the place of employment for these posts.
This post offers an exciting opportunity to make a major contribution to the development of internationally excellent research and teaching while allowing you unrivalled opportunities to progress and embed your career in an exciting and progressive institution. For more information, please visit our Department pages at Department of Sociology - Durham University
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