Role: Associate Professor, Northumbria Law School, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

  Contact: claire.bessant@northumbria.ac.uk

  Research Interests:
Family Law | Family Privacy | Children’s Rights | Sharenting

Dr Claire Bessant is a socio-legal scholar and Associate Professor at Northumbria Law School, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, in the United Kingdom. At Northumbria, Claire currently teaches modules focusing upon information law, particularly data protection law and access to environmental information. As a visiting lecturer, she has also taught data protection at other institutions.

Claire joined Northumbria Law School in 2002 having previously worked as a solicitor specialising in family law. She has since presented her research at national and international conferences and has published articles and book chapters in the fields of family law, privacy law, data protection, information sharing and human rights. She has contributed as sole and joint author to UK government and parliamentary consultations on both privacy and domestic abuse. At Northumbria, Claire is a member of and part of the management group of Northumbria's Gender, Violence and Abuse Interdisciplinary Research Theme. At a national level, she is a Fellow at the UK-based civil society organisation CONNECTED by DATA, sits on the Society of Legal Scholars Executive Committee and is a member of and mentor for the Socio-Legal Studies Association.

Claire research is primarily focused on how technology impacts both upon families’ and upon children's privacy. Claire has been undertaking research on 'sharenting' (a term used to describe parents sharing information about their children online) since 2017. Claire is particularly interested in the law’s response to sharenting. Her research has explored the legal remedies afforded to children in England whose information has been sharented, the application of the UKGDPR and EUGDPR to the phenomenon of sharenting, and with an interdisciplinary team of academics from the UK and US proposed a range of policy recommendations to address sharenting in an increasingly connected world. Claire’s focus whilst at the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative will be upon the application of vulnerability theory to the sharenting context.