The Experience Exchange
The Experience Exchange is a free series of hosted webinars exploring ideas, research and lived experience across the criminal legal system. Each event brings together an invited speaker and host to introduce a paper, topic or provocation before opening the conversation to everyone attending. Lived experience sits alongside research, policy, practice and activism—not as a story added to somebody else’s expertise, but as a vital form of knowledge in its own right. These are informal, collaborative spaces where people can think together, ask questions and respectfully disagree. Everybody is welcome. Bring your lunch, your curiosity, and your open hearts and minds.
TimeTable of Events
24th September Associate Professor Gill Buck
October 22nd Lucy Campbell and Dr John Anderson
November 12th Professor Shadd Maruna & Paul Doke
Week One: The History of Lived Experience in Criminal Justice
Hosted by Associate Professor Gill Buck
TBC September 2026,
12.30–1.30 pm
Associate Professor Gill Buck opens The Experience Exchange by sharing insights from her paper, Before It Was ‘New’: A Neglected History of Lived Experience-Led Criminal Justice. Gill will explore the people, movements and forms of collective action that placed lived experience at the heart of criminal justice long before it became a policy priority or professional buzzword. Her introduction will be followed by an open and informal discussion about what this history can teach us—and what may be lost when lived-experience-led work is treated as something newly invented.
Associate Professor Gill Buck is a social work and criminology researcher at the University of Chester. Her work explores lived-experience-led criminal justice, peer mentoring, coproduction and the use of creative and participatory research methods. Gill is the Principal Investigator of Imagining Possible Futures: Activating Lived Experience in Criminal Justice, a £1.1 million UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship examining historical and contemporary approaches to participatory criminal justice across the UK and Ireland. She works closely with people affected by the criminal legal system, researchers, practitioners and policymakers to challenge tokenistic involvement and develop more equitable approaches to knowledge, leadership and shared power.
Week Two:
The Metaphysics of Trauma and Psychedelic Integration
Hosted by Lucy Campbell and Dr John Anderson
22 October 12.30pm-1.30pm
Thursday, 22 October · 12:30 – 1:30pm
Lucy Campbell and Dr John Anderson invite us into a wide-ranging conversation about trauma, consciousness and the nature of reality. Beginning with their paper, A Quantum Elephant in the Room: An Entangled Hauntology of Prison, Lucy and John will explore what happens when lived experience, metaphysics and quantum physics are brought into conversation. Is trauma something contained within an individual mind, or can it also exist between bodies, within places and across time? How might altered states of consciousness change our relationship with traumatic experience, and what role does integration play afterwards? Lucy brings lived experience, autoethnography and conceptual criminology; John brings physics, neuroscience and psychedelic integration. Together, they will open these ideas for informal discussion—no prior knowledge of quantum physics required!
Lucy Campbell is a criminologist and public health researcher whose work explores imprisonment, incarceration-based trauma, affect, recovery and lived expertise. Drawing on seven years of imprisonment in Mexico and the UK, she uses autoethnography alongside feminist and posthumanist theory to examine the enduring, embodied and relational harms of prison. Lucy is Director of Policy and Advocacy at Experience for Justice and founder of Flip of the Coin, a lived-experience-led creative health organisation in the Scottish Highlands. Her work brings research, policy and community practice together to challenge whose knowledge is recognised and who is permitted to produce it.
Dr John Anderson is a cognitive scientist, qualified counsellor and psychedelic integration practitioner. He holds a degree in Neuroscience and a PhD in Psychology from Cardiff University. His postdoctoral research explored light-flicker-induced visual hallucinations, hallucination proneness and mental imagery. John now teaches cognitive psychology and postgraduate coaching while supporting people to make sense of psychedelic experiences and translate their insights into lasting change. His approach brings together neuroscience, transpersonal psychology, coaching and Celtic Druidism. John is a longstanding member of the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group and the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy, and his work is informed by his own healing journey with psilocybin and bipolar disorder.
Week Three: Desistance
Hosted by Prof Shadd Maruna and Paul Doke
Thursday, 12th November · 12:30 – 1:30pm
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Professor Shadd Maruna is Head of the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool. An internationally recognised criminologist, his work explores desistance, reintegration, redemption and the ways identity and personal narratives shape journeys away from criminalisation. His influential book, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives, transformed understandings of desistance and received the American Society of Criminology’s Outstanding Contribution to Criminology award. A former President of the American Society of Criminology, Shadd’s recent work examines knowledge equity, coproduction and the potential for desistance to become a wider social movement.
Paul Doke is a lived-experience researcher and PhD candidate at Liverpool John Moores University. His doctoral research, Made Good and Stayed Good, explores identity, recovery and belonging among long-term members of Narcotics Anonymous who have sustained desistance from criminalisation and substance use. The study builds upon Shadd Maruna’s original Liverpool Desistance Study—in which Paul was himself a participant—while placing lived expertise more firmly at the centre of desistance research. Paul has worked across criminal justice services in Merseyside and the North West for more than a decade, developing expertise in rehabilitation, resettlement, complex needs and drug and alcohol support.