Centre overview
The Centre’s work is grounded in a simple but profound idea: legal rights matter most when they are understood, accessed and relied upon in practice. CLaRION combines traditional doctrinal legal research with real world, socio-legal approaches to ensure its work is relevant, rigorous and impactful.
It's research focuses on three key areas: improving access to justice, enabling individuals and communities to exercise their rights, and challenging legal and structural barriers that prevent rights from being realised. Together, these areas connect individual experiences to wider systemic change.
CLaRION engages with partners including practitioners and professionals, community organisations and policy makers to co-produce research that leads to meaningful outcomes. By bridging law, policy, and lived experience, the Centre aims to deliver practical solutions that strengthen rights and promote societal inclusion.
The Centre's research focuses on three specific areas: improving access to justice, enabling individuals and communities to exercise their rights, and challenging the legal and structural barriers that prevent rights from being realised. Together, these areas connect individual experiences to wider systemic change.
CLaRION engages with partners including practitioners, professionals, community organisations and policy makers to co-produce research which leads to meaningful outcomes. By bridging law, policy and liver experience, the Centre aims to deliver practical solutions that strengthen rights and promote societal inclusion.
Themes
CLaRION works within the themes:
Focused on addressing many of the global challenges set out in the UN Sustainability Goals, this theme brings together researchers who approach these issues from a breadth of disciplinary perspectives that include the life sciences, engineering and computing but also embraces the social sciences and business disciplines.
This theme captures our research which both promotes and protects human health and wellbeing in communities. It covers a breadth of research from long term conditions to new drug discovery and a wide range of disciplines spanning health, social and life sciences and pharmacy.
Our research in this theme embraces a broad range of topic areas relating to social justice and creative practice, drawing together researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds including art and design, architecture, social sciences, law, and humanities .
Our research in this theme covers a broad range of computational research from Artificial Intelligence to interactive machine learning and cybersecurity and explores the impacts and implications of the digital for different domains including health, net zero, cities and creative practice.
Our people
Our members bring together both legal and social science perspectives.
Dr Sarah Sivers is the Director and Dr Uche Iloka is Co-Director.
Sarah Sivers
Associate Dean for Research
Uche Iloka
Senior Lecturer
Read further details on members of the centre, and to explore their work further:
Impact & knowledge exchange
Awards
- Dr Joseph Mante is part of the team which won the Interdisciplinary Team of the Year 2025, and
Dr Sarah Sivers won the Making an Impact with Research Award 2026, both at the Curious Minds Research Awards. - Dr Natascha Mueller-Hirth, with Professor Sarah Pedersen, won the Scottish Institute for Policing Research Impact Award 2023.
- The Annual South African Social Work Research award of the South African National Association of Social Workers and Veterans Association of South Africa is named in honour of Professor Gary Spolander for his contribution to social work research.
Accolades
- Dr Uche Iloka is member of the Academic Council of the United Nations Systems.
- The Grampian Regional Equality Council has appointed Dr Natascha Mueller-Hirth as a non-executive director, and Dr Ruth Woods as a board member. Natascha is also non-executive director of Miss Koch Kenya in Nairobi.
- Dr Joy Debski is a Board Member at Aberdeen Citizens Advice Bureau.
Knowledge Exchange
- Members contribute to Scottish and UK Government consultations, including Dr Temi Odunsanya and Dr Sarah Sivers
- Dr Katrina Forbes-McKay contributed to the British Psychological Society’s briefing report for the House of Lords during the debates on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.
- Dr David Smith has appeared several times of the Education Matters podcast, discussing young men and the manosphere.
- Dr Judith Oloo is a Governing Council Member at the National Crime Research Centre in Kenya.
- Dr Silvina Sanchez Mera has engaged in knowledge exchange with CETYS (Centre for Studies in Technology and Society) in Argentina.
- Uche Iloka, alongside other PGR researchers affiliated to CLaRION, hosts a biennial International Research Conference, culminating in a policy dialogue exploring how research informs policy development, involving researchers, Members of Parliament, industry leaders and other stakeholders.
Case Studies
Paediatric Dispute Avoidance - Dr Sarah Sivers
Cases such as Charlie Gard’s placed disagreement between the family of an infant with a life-limiting condition and their doctors in the public spotlight. Such cases often involve entrenched disputes between clinicians and parents about the feasibility of any further treatment and whether it is in the child’s best interests for treatment to stop. While the Gard case unfolded in the English courts, it can be only a matter of time before a case of this type arises in Scotland, where there is no legal precedent to date to rely on. This study shows that such disputes do arise in Scotland, but that families in dispute with clinicians have not as yet taken a case to court. The findings explore the triggers for such disagreements between parents and clinicians and the methods currently used to attempt to resolve them. The outcome of the research is evidence that formal dispute resolution is not, in most cases, the most effective result for those involved and that parents and clinicians can identify a range of relational approaches around behaviours and communication which can reduce the incidence of disagreements. Such approaches maximise the opportunities for initial low-level disagreements to be addressed and full-scale disputes avoided. Through this, and further related projects with partners including Children’s Hospices Across Scotland and NHS Lothian, Sarah has been able to create impact through her findings around the value of dispute avoidance, and influence change.
Violence and Resilience in Informal Settlements - Dr Natascha Mueller-Hirth
Natascha’s long-term research in Kenya, in partnership with Kenyan academics and 15 community-based organisations, examines how young people in three informal settlements in Nairobi respond to, and challenge, acute crises and the chronic conditions of informality. Such challenges include poverty and food insecurity, everyday and gender-based violence, environmental harms and electoral violence. Drawing on ethnographic and participatory methods, our research has identified strategies of resilience and best practice in youth community responses. We have subsequently jointly developed accessible outputs that can showcase best practice, challenges negative stereotypes about informal settlements, and strengthen the capacity of community-based organisations: a documentary film, a community toolkit, and training materials and modules, designed to “train the trainers” to ensure sustained impact.
Partnerships & collaboration
Partnership and collaboration are central to CLaRION’s work. By working with practitioners, policymakers, community organisations, the third sector and other researchers, we co-produce research grounded in real world experiences, connecting academic expertise with practice to strengthen legal rights, advance social justice and deliver meaningful impact.
Our partners
Children’s Hospices Across Scotland (CHAS) are a key partner in Dr Sarah Sivers’ research examining how disputes between parents and clinicians caring for a child with a life-shortening condition can be avoided.
Dr Sarah Sivers has also partnered with NHS Lothian in respect of work around the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and embedding children’s rights, a child-friendly complaints procedure and work on relational skills that can help to avoid situations where those children feel their rights have been overlooked.
Opportunities for collaboration
CLaRION welcomes collaboration with researchers, practitioners, policymakers, community organisations and the third sector. Opportunities include collaborative research, knowledge exchange, events, visiting partnerships, and postgraduate research studentships. We particularly welcome engagement from those interested in advancing legal rights, social justice and inclusion through practice-informed research.
Funding, projects & publications
Featured funding
- 2022 - NHS Grampian Charity, £12,000
Towards Avoiding Conflict in Difficult Care Management Decisions: understanding the causes of local disputes in paediatric medicine in order to develop pathways to dispute resolution in NHS Grampian - 2022 - Scottish Institute for Policing Research, £12,000
The impact of COVID-19 on partnerships between police and GBV service providers in remote, rural and island communities in Scotland - 2022 - Shetland Islands Council, £23,000
Anchor Project Evaluation
Featured projects
Through this funded PhD project, Dr Katrina Forbes-McKay is supervising research which evaluates the use and impact of tools used by health visitors and family nurses to capture the voice of vulnerable infants in order to support child-focused decision-making and support the UNCRC rights of all children.
A group of researchers including Dr Joseph Mante conducted a critical review of the relevant literature and existing legal framework on the use of AI technology in prisons, to detect, prevent and manage radicalisation and terrorism. From this, they make policy recommendations for the responsible use of AI in prison settings.
This mixed-methods study explored how encounters with different religious and nonreligious worldviews affect young adults in Britain. Using interviews and questionnaires, I investigated the social and emotional impacts of such encounters, and the conditions under which young people respond to them with uncertainty, reconstruction, or resistance.
Read more about the projects from CLaRION on Worktribe:
Featured publications
The incel mindset: entering and exiting inceldom
Dr David Smith, monograph/Palgrave Macmillan
Navigating legal pluralism: NGOs as jurisgenerative actors
Dr Uche Iloka, chapter in book/Springer
Legal rights and the institutional imagination
Dr Hamish Ross, monograph/Hart Publishing
Read more about the publications from CLaRION on Worktribe:
WORKTRIBE - CLaRION PUBLICATIONS
Study opportunities
Find out about some of the topics and subjects you could study at the centre:
- Approach to future care planning in motor neurone disease: ethical and legal perspectives
- Cross-continental Reimagining Public Benefit in Charity Law: Governance Mechanisms and the Evolution of Charitable Purposes
- End-of-life decision-making: balancing rights and views on assisted dying
- Environmental Conflict Environmental Peacebuilding
- How do experiences of religious diversity shape worldviews?
- Incapacity, rights and ethics: enshrining effective legal measures to support people through capacity transitions
- Incels, MRAs and Chads: Entering and exiting the manosphere
- Neo-colonial influences and corporate governance convergence: A case for corporate governance divergence in the Global South.
- NGOs and the Standardization of International Contracts: A Comparative Study of the CISG, AfCFTA, and Global Trade Frameworks
- NGOs in Global Governance: Redefining Accountability and Influence in International Law
- Striving for Global Gender Parity: A Cross-Stratum Approach
- The impact of procurement practices on infrastructure in developing countries
Read more about all opportunities and topics available to study at RGU:
News, insights & thought leadership
Find out what's happening at the centre:
News
Published: 13 March 2026
An RGU lecturer with a long-held research interest in the incel community and its members has released a book designed to shine fresh light on this fascinating yet scary world.
News
Published: 06 November 2025
Writing in The Scotsman, Professor Paul Arnell from RGU's School of Law and Social Sciences argues that more should be done to protect the European Convention on Human Rights.
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great”, said Zig Ziglar.
Work with us
If you would like to partner with the centre or have any questions about our research, please email: