Patricia Canning was born in Belfast and has spent many years working in and for the wider community in a range of roles (including as an adviser with the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, as manager of an outreach advice centre, and as an NVQ teacher and Internal Verifier of community work qualifications). She received her firstclass Honours degree, Masters, and PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast, where she taught Linguistics and Literature before moving to the Netherlands as an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University.
Patricia is now an Assistant Professor at Northumbria University at Newcastle. She has extensive research experience in linguistics, specifically, forensic linguistics in which she examines police documents and the language choices made by officers, prosecutors, and victims-survivors of gendered violence. Patricia has published work on disparities between official and personal accounts of traumatic events, including the Hillsborough Disaster. She works with survivors of domestic abuse, domestic abuse charities, and several UK police forces to improve routes to justice for women and girls. Patricia is using her important skillsets to enable the Panel to carry out thematic analyses of the large number of personal testimonies that we are collecting, which will form a centrepiece of our final report and recommendations.
Patricia is the author of over 20 articles, book chapters, and reports. She has published two books and is the co-author of an Independent Panel report into what went wrong at the Champions League Final in Paris in 2022.
Patricia currently lives in Durham with her 50,000 bees.