Meet the team

Dr Anthony Gunter

Dr Gunter is a Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies in the School of Education, Childhood, Youth & Sport (ECYS), at the Open University. Previously, he worked as a Principal Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of East London. His research interests and expertise are in the areas of: Black young people; youth cultures and transitions; ethnography; serious youth violence and gangs; race/ethnicity, crime and justice; and policing multi-ethnic urban neighbourhoods. He is the author of ‘Growing up Bad: Black Youth, Road Culture & Badness in an East London Neighbourhood’ (Tufnell Press, 2010), and ‘Race, Gangs and Youth Violence: Policy, Prevention and Policing’ (Policy Press, 2017), and with Ellis & Marques ‘Thug Criminology: A Call to Action’ (University of Toronto Press, 2023). Prior to his career in academia Anthony worked for over 14 years as a detached community and youth practitioner and Project /Area Manager.

Dr Adam Ellis

Dr Ellis is an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Waterloo (Canada). He was named a 2016 Vanier Scholar in support of his doctoral project, “Reconceptualizing Urban Warfare in Canada: Exploring the Relationship between Trauma, PTSD and Gang Violence”. Adam’s doctoral work is inspired by his own lived experience within the ‘gang’ sub-culture. His research is situated within a participatory-decolonizing framework. He has worked on several research projects focusing on the relationship between trauma and urban violence. He has provided consultancy on mental health and criminal justice-related issues with a variety of public and private institutions. Adam is currently leading the design and implementation of Toronto’s first ‘Street Organization Transformation Model’. He is currently developing his first edited text “Thug Criminology". He is also co-director of the Street Trauma Institute, an international research hub focusing on urban marginality, community/interpersonal trauma and violence. Adam is also designing and implementing a number of community programs to disrupt street-related violence in the Greater Toronto Area.

Dr Amber Fensham-Smith

Dr Fensham-Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies at the Open University. Prior to her appointment at the Open University, Amber was a lecturer in education at the University of Bedfordshire. Amber’s research expertise lies in the field of alternative education and informal learning. Her (ESRC funded) doctorate explored the role of new technologies and learning communities and knowledge networks in UK home-education. This was a novel mixed method study that involved 242 families across England, Scotland and Wales. Prior to the completion of her PhD, Amber was commissioned by the Welsh Government and the ESRC to conduct a mixed-method research project on in engaging Gypsy and Traveller Families in education. Currently, she is working on a participatory project using Photovoice with a group of home educated learners in Sussex (funded by the University of Brighton).

Dr Ian Joseph

Dr Ian Joseph is a Senior Lecturer in Youth Studies at the Open University. Previously, he was a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of East London. He has over 30 years of policy/ applied research experience that provides him with a grounded mix of practice-based teaching, policy-related scholarship, knowledge exchange and co-production through collaborative partnerships. His career contains an extensive body of qualitative and quantitative research covering a wide range of policy/ applied issues, with a specific focus on race and inclusion. Ian has been the principal investigator and/or had a leading role on several large-scale research and evaluation projects that focus on policing, youth justice, and gang violence intervention to name just a few. He is currently the principal investigator for the evaluation of a community-based public health approach programme that is focused on mitigating youth violence in London.

Dr Michael Boampong

Dr Boampong is a Senior Advisor on Youth at at ChildFund International (Washington DC), and is a Visiting Research Fellow at The Open University. Prior to joining ChildFund International, Michael was a Lecturer in Childhood & Youth Studies at The Open University. Previously, he served as a migration and youth policy specialist to multiple United Nations (UN) agencies and the Commonwealth Secretariat. Michael also served as lead consultant to the Government of Ghana in the review of Ghana’s 2010 National Youth Policy, and authored the UN flagship World Youth Report: Youth and Migration (2013). Michael’s broad research interests concern the intersection of globalisation and local practices and their impact on transnational childhoods and youth transitions. His most recent work is, Growing up in times of crisis, a multi-sited ethnographic study of 95 children, youth and their social relations in Ghana, USA and the UK.

Dr Clare Choak

Dr Choak has been researching and teaching about the lives of young people for eighteen years. She has a particular interest in class, gender, race and the ways in which they intersect to create potential forms of oppression. Her first research project was a three-year national ethnographic study which explored how young people from deprived areas build relationships with youth practitioners through sport. Since then she has worked on a number of research projects funded by organisations such as Save the Children, the Home Office, and Office of the Children’s Commissioner. Her work focuses on young women who are on road and in gangs, which builds on Dr Anthony Gunter’s work around road culture and badness. She recently published a journal article about the need to decolonise the discipline of criminology.

Beverley Gilbert

Beverley Gilbert is an Associate Lecturer in Criminology and Social Sciences at the Open University and has over 20 years’ experience as a teacher and trainer in Sociology, Law, Global Perspectives and Business Studies, working in post-16 education and training environments. She also has several years’ experience as a Learning and Teaching Coach in Further Education. Beverley was recently Project Coordinator for, Hyperlocal Working and Violence Reduction in Walthamstow Neighbourhood: A Learning & Evaluation Study (2022), which was led by Dr Anthony Gunter and has written collaboratively with Dr Clare Choak (Black Women and State-Sanctioned Police Violence: The Case of Sarah Reed, 2021).

Dr Anna Orrnert

Dr Anna Orrnert is a Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies at The Open University. Prior to joining The Open University, Anna taught for several years on the Working with Children, Young People and Families programme at Newman University in Birmingham. She has also worked as a researcher for the University of Birmingham’s International Development Department and the Conflict Analysis Research Centre at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Her research about young people has fed into policy and programming of international aid donors, including the UK’s Department for International Development (now, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) and AusAID. She worked with the American NGO Mediators Beyond Borders to develop an initiative supporting former child soldiers returning to civilian communities after the end of the civil war in Liberia. Her research interests include youth transitions to adulthood, intersectionality, inequality and power. Her doctoral study examined young women’s transitions to adulthood in a post-industrial British city (Birmingham) at the intersection of gender, social class and race. She is currently working on developing this into a longitudinal study.