Dr Martha Newson’s research centres on group bonding, ritual, and community. The populations and methodologies she works with are diverse: from taking saliva samples from football fans at live World Cup matches in Brazil to investigate stress; to interviewing rave participants in warehouses across London; to running surveys with fundamentalist Muslims and hardcore football fans in Indonesia and Australia.
Academically, she is based at the Universities of Kent and Oxford. She completed her BSc at Sussex and postgraduate studies at Oxford. She currently leads research on how major football clubs can help tackle reoffending in partnership with the Twinning Project, Her Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service, the Ministry of Justice, and Prof Harvey Whitehouse.