Meet the Core Team of MCYS

Alex Wheatle

Alex Wheatle

Alex has over 12 years experience working in youth services for Streatham Youth Community Trust where he helped set up and lead a homework club for young carers.

• His first novel, Brixton Rock, was published to critical acclaim by BlackAmber Books in 1999.
• Alex won the London Arts Board Writers Prize in 2000.
• East of Acre Lane was published by Fourth Estate/Harper Collins in 2001
• The Seven Sisters was published by Fourth Estate/Harper Collins in 2003
• Island Songs was published by Allison & Busby in 2005
• Checkers, co-written with Mark Parham, was published by the X-Press in 2006
• The Dirty South was published by Serpents Tail in 2008
• Alex was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2008
• Brenton Brown, the sequel to Brixton Rock, was published by Arcadia in 2011
• Alex wrote and performed his own one man show, Uprising in 2011.  Produced by Tara Arts, Alex toured the UK with the show in 2011 and 2012.
• Alex’s first young adult novel, Liccle Bit, was published by Little, Brown in March 2015. It was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2015.
• Shame & Scandal, Alex’s debut play, played to sold out audiences at the Albany Theatre, Deptford in October, 2015.
• Crongton Knights, the follow-up novel to Liccle Bit, was published by Little, Brown in March 2016.
• Crongton Knights won the Guardian’s Children’s fiction award for 2016.  It also won the Renaissance Quiz Writers’ Choice Award and has been shortlisted for the 2017 Bookseller Young Adult prize.
• Straight Outta Crongton, the third in the Crongton trilogy, was published in April, 2017, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Bookseller Young Adult prize.
• Kerb Stain Boys, a novella, was published by Barrington Stoke in October, 2018.
• Homegirl, the fourth in the Crongton series, will be published in April, 2019.
• Alex’s novels have been translated into German, French and Italian.

Alex has written articles about racism, child abuse, the 1981 Brixton uprising, the 2011 riots, knife crime, youth culture and youth language for newspapers including The Guardian, Daily Mirror, Independent, Evening Standard & The Voice.

Alex is presently working on a slave revolt novella which is based on a real slave rebellion which occurred in St Mary, Jamaica 1760.

Alex’s guilty reading pleasure is The Thorn Birds and his favourite film genre is film noir of the 1940s & 1950s.

Hannah Smithson

Hannah Smithson is A Professor of Criminology and Youth Justice and Director of the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, at Manchester Metropolitan University.  Hannah has worked within the field of criminology for over 15 years, the majority of her work involves engagement with a number of communities in and outside of the university, including professionals, activists and the Third Sector.  She has directed projects funded by the YJB, ESRC, AHRC, local authorities, police forces and charities.  Her research has been instrumental in shaping agendas in research and policy across three interconnected areas: Youth Justice, Youth Gangs and Community Safety and Crime Prevention.

Hannah is committed to developing research methods that enable young people’s participation in the research process.

Hannah very proudly hails from Yorkshire, loves camping trips in the family camper van; is currently learning Spanish and her favourite film is Rocky!

I understand Sylvester Stallone is just about to release Creed 2.

Dr Paul Gray

Dr Paul Gray is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at MMU and Deputy Director of the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies.  He has nearly 25 years of experience conducting criminology research in the public, private and third sectors.  His research interests are young people in the youth justice system and young people’s substance use.  He is an obsessive rock-climber, long-time Arsenal fan, and lover of heavy metal (Paul may well feel like climbing Mt Kilimanjaro if Crystal Palace beat Arsenal this season and I get to tease him about it).

Rob Drummond

Rob is a senior lecturer in Linguistics, specialising in sociolinguistics, and head of youth language in the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies. Rob is particularly interested in the ways in which spoken language varies between individuals and groups of speakers, and the role that language variation plays in the construction and performance of identity. This involves the study of accents and dialects, and the ability to measure fine phonetic differences in people’s speech.

Having spent a number of years looking at the patterns of such sociolinguistic variation in a second language, he currently focuses on three areas of research:

Urban youth language – www.urben-id.org

The accents, dialects and identities of people in Greater Manchester - www.manchestervoices.org

Accent/language prejudice – www.accentism.org

Rob used to work as a TV extra, and once escorted Ray Winstone to a prison cell. I hazard a guess that the film in question was Scum but surely Rob was far too young to have played that role...or was he?

Caitlin Nunn

Caitlin has spent more than a decade researching the lived experiences of refugee-background young people in resettlement countries, including in relation to integration and transnationalism, and identity and belonging. Much of her research employs participatory and arts-based approaches.  Caitlin has published in journals including the Journal of Youth Studies and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and has collaborated with refugee-background young people, artists, local governments and service providers on a number of arts-based and audio-visual works, including a 2017 event at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Caitlin is committed to working with young people to produce critical and creative knowledge and understandings, and to share them with a range of audiences in the pursuit of a more just society.

Caitlin’s coffee habit migrated with her from Melbourne, Australia and she was devastated that her books didn’t travel with her. 

I know how Caitlin feels – I still mourn my missing comics of my childhood.

Anna-Christina Jones

Anna-Christina Jones is an interdisciplinary researcher working in the area of criminology and youth justice. Anna-Christina has a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Investigative and Forensic Psychology from the University of Liverpool.  She is currently completing a PhD in Youth Justice at MMU. Anna-Christina led the Greater Manchester Youth Justice University Partnership’s (GMYJUP) Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project, an initiative that facilitated the bi-directional transfer of ideas and initiatives between academia and practice and led the collaborative development of effective practice within the Greater Manchester YJS.

The KTP project was the first of its kind in the field of youth justice, and was also a first for MMU’s Faculty of Humanities Languages and Social Sciences (now part of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities)

Anna-Christina once took part (just as the passenger mind you!) in a record attempt for tandem paragliding near the Himalayas in Nepal.

I feel sick just thinking about paragliding, Anna!

Deborah Jump

Deborah Jump is a senior lecturer in criminology at Manchester Metropolitan University, and head of Youth Justice for the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies.  Deborah is the principal investigator of Getting out for Good, a three year Comic Relief funded project to investigate the impact of sport and cultural activities on young women at risk of youth violence, and sexual exploitation.  Deborah is also the co-investigator on Kicking Crime into Touch, a project exploring the effectiveness of Rugby Union on young men’s offending attitudes.