Since 2020, Sarah has been involved in two Youth Justice Board Pathfinder projects in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Wolverhampton. The first examined serious youth violence (with Laura Caulfield, Jane Booth, and Mark Monaghan; Caulfield et al., 2022, 2023). The second (with Laura Caulfield, Yasmin Devi-McGleish, and Mary-Rose Puttick as Co-Investigator, 2025–28) evaluates a new racial trauma intervention delivered by Dignifi across seven local authorities in the West Midlands. She served as Chair of the Over-represented Children group within the Youth Justice Board's Academic Liaison Network and as a member of the network's steering group.
She is currently preparing a book manuscript for Policy Press examining the overlooked spatial dimension of youth justice delivery. The book positions youth justice as operating in a 'third phase' which is increasingly informal and community-based. Institutional theory, carceral mobilities, child poverty, and societal change are used as analytical lenses to understand just institutional interventions from a fresh perspective, with a view to encouraging more appropriate treatment of marginalised groups.
Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on social policy, geography, sociology, and criminology. Sarah has contributed to learned society activities for early career researchers through the Social Policy Association, to Visual Research for the British Sociological Association, and recently joined the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Carceral Geographies Working Group. She is also collaborating with Marcelo Blumenfeld, Dilum Dissanayake, and Magda Zorrilla (Co-Investigators), led by Sara Hassan (PI), across the University of Birmingham (i.e. Engineering, Geography, and Citi-REDI) to develop a new Transport and Mobilities Network.