Online seminar series: What is the Global South and why it matters - Session 8

Go East: Between Northern and Southern Criminological Theories in Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Speakers: Professor Laura Piacentini, University of Strathclyde, and Professor Gavin Slade, Nazarbayev University

This session is currently being finalised. Please check back soon for more information.

About the speakers

Professor Laura Piacentini
Laura Piacentini is a multi-award-winning professor of criminology at the School of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

A Russian speaker, Laura is the first Westerner to conduct empirical and theoretical research in post-USSR jails. Her doctorate was the first research council funded PhD on incarceration in contemporary Russia and she has been researching and publishing on this subject for nearly 30 years since then. She is also a trained sociologist engaged in multi-disciplinary research that includes fields such as human geography, political science, law, and criminology and has been Co-I or PI on numerous studies of post-Soviet penal culture. With Professor Slade, Laura is the lead on the major prison study funded by ESRC: 'In the Gulag’s Shadow: Producing, Consuming and Perceiving prisons in the former USSR'. This unique project seeks to produce global criminology’s first empirical and theoretical study of Russian penal culture. In 2014, Professor Piacentini was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and appointed Fellow at 'AcademiaNet' for leading European Women Scholars, established by Angela Merkel then the Chancellor of Germany.

Laura co-founded the research cluster Criminal and Social Justice at the School of Social Work and Social Policy with Professor Beth Weaver in 2016 and led on the University’ of Strathclyde’s partnership in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research that same year where she is also Associate Director.

Between 2015 and 2020, she was a co-editor-in-chief of the leading criminology journal, Criminology & Criminal Justice.

Laura’s next book published by Routledge is out in April 2022. It is called ‘The Virtual Reality of Imprisonment in Russia; “Preparing myself for prison in a contested human rights landscape’ and it is co-authored with Dr Elena Katz (Oxford and Helsinki).

Professor Gavin Slade
Gavin Slade is an associate professor in sociology. He completed a PhD in criminology from the University of Oxford and has previously held positions at the University of Toronto, Freie Universitat, Berlin and the University of Glasgow. He works on questions of criminal justice reform in the former Soviet Union with a focus on prisons, policing and organized crime.

His most recently completed project, funded by the German Research Foundation and the European Commission, involved a comparative case study of how penal reform produces violence and contention in post-Soviet prison systems, comparing Georgia, Moldova, Lithuania and Kyrgyzstan. Slade is a Principal Investigator on a new project running from 2018-2021, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, and entitled ‘In the Gulag’s Shadow: Producing, Consuming and Perceiving Prisons in the Former Soviet Union.’ The project applies criminological theory to show how the practice of incarceration is being reconstituted by social, economic, cultural and political processes in Russia and Kazakhstan. Slade has also done work for the Council of Europe, Open Society Foundation as well as the European Union’s project ‘Enhancing Criminal Justice in Kazakhstan.’

About the seminar series

The series features speakers from across the world, drawn from social science and social work disciplines who explore how concepts related to the Global South impact policy and practice. The series will be of interest to academics, professionals, students, researchers and policy makers eager to diversify their knowledge and make their professional practice more inclusive. It would appeal to those working in the areas of criminal justice including prisons, probation services and policing, education, nursing, psychology, social science, sociology and social work.

The series is set up to encourage discussion and debate with time for a paper and discussion – so please come along and join the debate! The topics can be found on the Eventbrite link.

The seminar series is chaired by Dr Amy Duvenage and Professor Elaine Arnull, Southampton Solent University, who are happy to hear from you if you have any questions/comments:

elaine.arnull@solent.ac.uk

amy.duvenage@solent.ac.uk

Everyone is welcome – whether you are an expert in the area or wanting to hear what the Global South is and what ideas the speakers have about it.