Introduction

Having spent 25 years working in social justice policy and practice, and close on 15 years in academia, I identify as a practice-informed academic and an academic seeking to inform policy and practice. Such an orientation has been described as that of a pracademic. In this chapter, I outline and reflect upon how I have sought to use this pracademic melding of research, policy and practice experience to advance social justice in the hate crime domains in England, Wales and Ireland.

There is a relatively small body of literature on academics engaging with the policymaking process (Le Grand, 2006; Avey and Desch, 2014; Talbot and Talbot, 2014). There is an even smaller body of literature on academics contributing to the hate crime policy domain (Chakraborti and Garland, 2014; Giannasi, 2014; Hall, 2014). There is a gap in the literature on academics – on pracademics who start out in the policy domain and who transition to academia and seek to engage in both. This chapter begins to explore aspects of that gap.

Perspectives, key concepts and positionality

In this chapter, I use some concepts and terms and refer to some perspectives throughout. At the outset, I set out my understandings and position in relation to these perspectives, concepts and terms.

I start with social justice. Social justice is a widely used concept today. Although widely used, it has varied understandings, and to some extent it is a contested concept. I would identify a few broad perspectives on social justice, all concerned with a focus on social identities and economic inequalities. These perspectives I identify as social justice liberalism, critical social justice and anti-social justice.

In Western liberal democracies, social justice liberalism is broadly reflected in academia and in some governmental policy domains. Social justice liberalism is a broad approach concerned with ensuring equality of opportunity, reasonable accommodations, group-conscious policies, minority-specific and targeted policies both in terms of identity-based inequalities and economic inequalities. An excellent contemporary application of a progressive social justice liberalism approach to the analysis of criminalising hate is to be found in the work of Walters (2022).

Critical social justice is espoused in parts of academia and in social movements and to a much lesser extent in governmental policy domains. Critical social justice places emphases on structural, systemic, cultural and institutional inequalities and occasionally on individual experiences of inequality.