About

Our mission

CIRCLE aims to provide a stimulating and inclusive research environment for producing innovative, rigorous, evidence-informed and impactful research on aspects of care and caring across the life course, with a particular emphasis on care and its links with forms of paid and unpaid labour and inequalities. It promotes regional, national and internationally focused research. At its core is a commitment to advance theoretical, methodological and policy and practice knowledge in relation to care at all stages of the life course. It aims to provide a space to facilitate interdisciplinary research synergies between academics in the Faculty of Social Sciences and beyond. At its heart is an obligation to excellent and accessible scholarship, to respectful collaboration with external partners, including those with lived experiences, and to open discussion of research findings with diverse audiences.

Key principles

Promoting equality in care: Care provision and experiences are profoundly unequal. They are gendered, racialised and ageist, and can profoundly impact on the life chances, participation and wellbeing of individuals, families and households across the life course. CIRCLE has at its heart, a commitment to exploring and understanding these inequalities and their interactions, by enhancing theoretical and empirical evidence of care inequalities and providing policy and practice-based solutions.    

Producing impactful research which makes a difference: A key priority is to ensure the Centre’s work has regional, national and international policy and practice impact, resulting from innovative, rigorous and evidence-informed research on aspects of care and caring across the life course.

Coproduction and stakeholder involvement: CIRCLE will advocate meaningful engagement with people involved in care; including those who rely on or need care, and who design, provide, deliver or organise care services, working co-productively with people with lived experience of care. CIRCLE will connect academics, partners, students and stakeholders with government partners to inform emerging intellectual care agendas, enabling agile responses to updates within the field.

Enhancing Capacity-building among researchers: The Centre will facilitate capacity-building among researchers at all stages of their careers and across disciplines, through providing support, connections, training, knowledge exchange and skills development opportunities. By establishing an inclusive and collaborative space CIRCLE will foster a supportive culture promoting the production of robust, high-quality care research.

Emerging research themes

• Researching Care
• Theorising Care
• Children, Young People and Families
• Organising, Labour and Employment
• The Political Economy of Care

We are interested in developing further themes linked to CIRCLE priorities.