Since 2016, Adam has been a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Law, University of Sheffield. Before arriving in Sheffield, he was a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Public Policy in the Department of Politics, University of York. He has also spent time as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington (Seattle) and a researcher for Gun Free South Africa (Cape Town) and Demos (London).

Adam’s research focuses on three interconnected themes:

• The rise of the private security and private military industries in the post-war era;
• Corresponding issues of governance, regulation and legitimacy in the security and military sectors;
• The changing nature of state-market relations.

Over the past decade, he has published 30 journal articles and book chapters on the privatisation of criminal justice and defence as well as one book, ‘The Politics of Private Security: Regulation, Reform and Re-Legitimation’.

In his work with the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, Adam is working primarily on the Bradford Mapping project. The aim of the project is to explore organisational interactions and outcomes from the perspective of practitioners and the lived realities of service recipients. It is hoped that this will lead to a better understanding of vulnerability conditions and service responses, as well as the compounding and interdependent effects of interactions between vulnerabilities and services. The project team are working with a range of local partners to derive insight from, and add value to, the Connected Yorkshire research database to co-produce research that informs improvement to services that better meet the needs of vulnerable groups and reduce harm.