Dr Leona Vaughn is a Sociologist and qualified coach/mentor for senior professionals, with over 20 years working as an equalities and social justice expert nationally and internationally.

At the Crown Prosecution Service, she worked on the first ever public prosecution policy on race hate crimes and the first ever positive action scholarship scheme with the Attorney General’s office to address under-representation of Black prosecutors. Other former roles include Chief Executive of the hate crime charity Anthony Walker Foundation and Non-Executive Director of Liverpool Football Club’s Foundation.

In her current role as tenure-track Derby Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool (UoL), her work is on developing anticolonial methodologies for researching ‘slavery and unfree labour’ which centre minoritised groups in knowledge production. As Research Director for the UK Collaborative for Development Research international consultation on safeguarding, part of the research community’s response to the abuses in Haiti, she designed, delivered and co-authored the report and Safeguarding Guidance adopted by all research councils in the collaborative.

Leona researches and writes on ‘risk’, ‘safeguarding’, ‘racialisation’, ‘child labour’, ‘modern slavery’ and ‘childhood radicalisation’. She established the ‘Risk Work in Young Lives Researcher Network’ for the North West Social Sciences Doctoral Training Programme to bring together researchers, practitioners and young people to share and develop practice. She is lead author of Heseltine Institute Liverpool City Region Briefing ‘Racial Inequalities and COVID-19: Building Back Better for All’ and was the Principle Investigator on a rapid response research project on the racialisation of risk narratives for COVID-19 prevention in Ghana, Kenya & South Africa, collaboratively designed with in-country academics and community researchers.

She is also co-chair of the UoL Black Asian and Minority Ethnic Staff Network, and co-produced a report of the Network’s Black Lives Matter in Higher Education panel outlining the challenge to local HEI’s.

Glenda Gaspard, final year BA Architecture student and School of the Arts EDI student rep, will chair the session.

Making a difference in the real world: Research into anticolonial inquiry