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HMI Probation is committed to reviewing, developing and promoting the evidence base for high-quality probation and youth offending services. Academic Insights are aimed at all those with an interest in the evidence base. We commission leading academics to present their views on specific topics, assisting with informed debate and aiding understanding of what helps and what hinders probation and youth offending services. This report was kindly produced by Dr Coral Sirdifield and Professor Charlie Brooker, highlighting the importance of maximising positive mental health outcomes for people under probation supervision – both for the individuals themselves and in terms of wider societal benefits. While there are various barriers, there are a number of steps that service users, professionals and policy makers can take to help overcome these barriers. There is also a role for researchers in strengthening the evidence base, with a need for investment in research and evaluation linked to potential models of good practice. Most immediately, those working in health and justice need to be aware of the potential for exacerbation of mental health issues due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of recovery planning work, systems need to be in place to ensure that both staff and those being supervised can access appropriate support.

What is the future of technocracy, after COVID-19, asks Jonathan White (LSE)? Current crisis management only blurs ever more the boundary between politics and technical expertise, he argues.

COVID-19 has decimated livelihoods in urban India and created a new underclass of workers who are being pushed into poverty. Shania Bhalotia, Swati Dhingra and Fjolla Kondirolli (LSE) say a national work guarantee is needed to prevent mass long-term unemployment and poverty.

On the 21st and 22nd November at the University of Liverpool in London, NCRM held an innovation forum to explore the embryonic field of “investigative social research” and the methods that underpin it. A dynamic and frequently high impact contemporary field, investigative social research encompasses work by non-governmental organisation/civil society researchers, data and investigative journalists, open source investigators, lawyers and independent researchers alongside social scientists of all kinds, from anthropologists, criminologists, epidemiologists, geographers, historians and sociologists through to those involved in accounting, economics and financial studies as well as data science. This emerging global field is characterised by the breadth of output it produces: often fast-circulating studies, news stories, reports, trackers and apps which attract global public attention. Researchers in the field make heavy use of: “new data technologies and analytics and other means of intellectual cross pollination, exchanging ideas and sometimes working and writing together, side by side, across borders, and genres each of them with different perspectives, backgrounds, interests, professional expertise, not to mention internationally and culturally diverse geographic and economic circumstances” (Lewis 2018: 23). In this context, investigative researchers are developing approaches which, as Ruppert and Savage observe, “engage with new forms of data and analytic techniques, undertake rich empirical analysis as well as develop new resources for understanding [the world and what happens in it]” (Ruppert and Savage 2009: 17). In so doing, researchers are contributing to the development of distinctive new “ways of knowing” (ibid.). No longer the preserve of universities and academic disciplines, this opening up and reworking of “the methods and practices that researchers and analysts use to make sense of data” and do useful things with it (Arribas-Bel & Reades 2018: 5) is happening across disciplinary, sectoral and geographical boundaries (with collaborations spanning the globe and involving researchers from countries in the Global South as much as the North). Investigative social research, as the forum showed, is often data intensive, digitally enabled, highly collaborative and impactful and gives rise to its own distinctive “politics of method” (Savage & Burrows 2007, Gray 2019). The purpose of the forum was to explore the methods that enable researchers in this field to pursue topics of social, political and economic import. Whether it is the investigations into the Panama and Paradise Papers, the identification of the Salisbury Novichok poisoners, the documenting of NATO airstrikes as well as civilian deaths across the Middle East, the verification of political violence in Africa through crowd-sourced video and photographic imagery, the tracking and tracing of those infected by COVID-19 during the current pandemic or in quickly contextualising and framing emerging news stories by drawing on new datasets and analytical techniques, investigative social research engages with important aspects of our lives.

Problems of this severity and scope can only be solved through global cooperation, write Muhammad Shahbaz and Muhammad Ali Nasir

California’s ‘superstar’ cities and regions – which together make up nearly 90 percent of the state’s GDP – have experienced the highest number of COVID-19 cases. Maliha Ahmed writes that despite being hard hit, these superstar areas have a combination of industries which have been less affected by the pandemic compared to those in poorer areas. With both superstar and non-superstar areas experiencing nearly equal increases in unemployment since February, she argues that policymakers will need to target assistance to poorer areas to prevent rising inequality.

The thirteenth annual workshop of the European Network for Breast Development and Cancer (ENBDC) Laboratories Annual Workshop took place on the 28-30 April 2022 in Weggis, Switzerland and focused on methods in mammary gland biology and breast cancer. Sixty scientists participated in the ENBDC annual workshop which had not been held in person since 2019 due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Topics spanned the mammary gland biology field, ranging from lactation biology and embryonic development, single cell sequencing of the human breast, and stunning cutting-edge imaging of the mouse mammary gland and human breast as well as breast cancer research topics including invasive progression of the pre-invasive DCIS stage, metabolic determinants of endocrine therapy resistance, models for lobular breast cancer, and how mutational landscapes of normal breast during age and pregnancy determine cancer risk. The latest findings from participating researchers were presented through oral presentations and poster sessions and included plenty of unpublished work.

Despite the overall drop in COVID-19 deaths, the latest data reveal continuing increases occurring in care homes and the community. Melanie Henwood explains why there is a need for more scrutiny around what is happening in care homes and across the social care system.