New ESRC Post-Doctorate Fellow in Criminology!

The School of Social Work and Social Policy is delighted to welcome Dr Kirsty Deacon who joins us as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow. Kirsty who won the highly competitive Fellowship this year will be looking at imprisonment and its impacts on families. Specifically, her research interests include children and young people, families and relationships, and imprisonment. Her doctoral research utilised qualitative interviews to explore young people’s experiences of the imprisonment of a parent or sibling, and as part of this explored ideas of simultaneous imprisonment where both the young person and their family member were serving a prison sentence at the same time.  Kirsty will be mentored by Professor Laura Piacentini and Dr Cara Jardine.

On Kirsty’s arrival, Professor Piacentini noted:

We are so delighted to welcome Kirsty to SWSP and to the Criminal and Social Justice cluster. Kirsty’s work is urgently needed both for criminological scholarship and intellectual inquiry into how imprisonment shapes the contours of the family but also, and crucially, for furthering our understanding of how penal systems connect to families affected by the incarceration of a loved one. Kirsty joins a  growing community in the School who are committed to high quality criminal and social justice research and criminological scholarship