Joanna Gilmore

Profile

Biography

Dr Joanna Gilmore

LLB (Newcastle), MRes (Manchester), PhD (Manchester), PGCAP (York)

Senior Lecturer, York Law School | Associate, Centre for Applied Human Rights

EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) Research Lead 

Dr Joanna Gilmore is a Senior Lecturer at York Law School and an Associate of the Centre for Applied Human Rights. She is a socio-legal researcher whose work examines policing, public order law, protest governance, and counter-terrorism through the lens of historical injustice and transitional justice. A central organising theme of her current research is how law, policy, and institutions can deliver guarantees of non-recurrence—the reforms, accountability mechanisms, and practices needed to prevent the repetition of harm—particularly in contexts of police misconduct and state violence.

Joanna’s current research programme connects contemporary controversies over policing and protest to longer histories of institutional power and resistance. Her interest in transitional justice frameworks is grounded in sustained work on police misconduct and the long shadow of contested policing histories, including her research on the 1984-85 miners’ strike and related projects on state responses to dissent. This work foregrounds questions of truth recovery, institutional accountability, and repair, and focuses on how standards of non-recurrence translate into concrete institutional reform, oversight, and preventative practice.

Methodologically, Joanna combines doctrinal analysis with community-engaged socio-legal research and oral history methodologies. She has partnered with National Life Stories at the British Library, drawing on oral history as both evidence and method—capturing lived experience, institutional memory, and the ways harm and resistance are narrated over time. She is also developing, with Dr Mattia Pinto, AI-assisted archival analysis to support the systematic examination of large bodies of historical and institutional records relevant to accountability and non-recurrence, including how institutional learning is recorded, obscured, or denied, and how patterns of harm persist across political and policing contexts.

Joanna has worked closely with a range of UK-based and international human rights organisations and think tanks, including Liberty and The Century Foundation. She also partners with miscarriage of justice charity APPEAL, reflecting a sustained commitment to research that supports accountability, fairness, and remedies where legal and institutional failures have produced profound harm. She is a former National Executive Committee Member of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers and co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project, an independent grassroots organisation working to build community resistance against police violence, harassment and racism. Her research is underpinned by a strong commitment to impact and knowledge exchange; in 2021 she initiated an open letter, signed by over 1,000 law academics, opposing proposals to restrict protest under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, and produced a briefing for trade unionists on the implications of the proposals for organising.

Joanna graduated from Newcastle University with a First Class LLB as the highest performing student, receiving a number of academic prizes including the Sweet & Maxwell Prize. She then worked for a legal aid law firm in North East England, followed by an educational role with the National Probation Service, before being awarded 1+3 funding at the University of Manchester to complete an ESRC-recognised MRes in Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies. She was awarded a PhD in 2013 for her thesis, This is Not a Riot: Regulation of Protest and the Impact of the Human Rights Act 1998, examined by Professor Robert Reiner (LSE) and Professor David Mead (UEA). Joanna was appointed Lecturer in Law at the University of Manchester in 2012, moved to the University of York as Lecturer in Law in 2013, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Law in 2021.

Joanna’s research has attracted significant media coverage informing public debate (including The Guardian, BBC Newsnight, and Channel 4 News), has attracted parliamentary attention, and has had demonstrable impact. Her research on the policing of the anti-fracking movement, for example, contributed to an intervention by the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and the right to freedom of expression.

Joanna serves on the Editorial Board of Justice, Power and Resistance and is the former Secretary of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control. She is currently Co-Director of the Criminalisation of Dissent and Activism Working Group and a member of the Institute of Employment Rights Research Panel.

Joanna is the Widening Participation Tutor and EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) Research Lead in York Law School, and has taken a leading role in departmental, university, and national initiatives to remove barriers to higher education and the legal profession. She grew up in a former mining town in North East England—an area with historically low progression to higher education—which continues to inform her commitment to widening access and supporting students under-represented in legal education and the profession.

Research

Overview

You can view a list of Dr Joanna Gilmore's current research projects on the York Research Database.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Criminal Law (Subject Lead)
• Counter Terrorism & Media Case Study (Module Lead)
• Introduction to Law & Society (Module Team)

Postgraduate

• LLM Current Issues in Counter Terrorism (Module Lead)

Publications

Full publications list

You can view a list of Dr Joanna Gilmore's publications on the York Research Database.