4th Annual Ethnographies of Crime and Control Symposium 

Laura Piacentini will be presenting at the 4th Annual Ethnographies of Crime and Control Symposium at the Pearce Institute, Govan, Glasgow on 13-14 June on:

"Digital Ethnographer: How 'interneting' in Russian prisons produces collective expression and control of Russian prisoners' communal mind

Laura will argue that criminology continues to pay scant attention to Russia's extraordinary, contemporary penal system. This is even more surprising given Criminology's recent theoretical turn towards disrupting the dominance of global north scholarship through new critical work coming from 'the global south'.  Yet, the former Soviet Union is nowhere in these debates on punishment's formation. The field is still dominated by Western and Southern criminological research. The absence of Russia from theoretical and empirical understandings of world penal development has significant impact on methodological approaches to the study of post-Soviet punishment, not least researcher positionality, ethnographic and cultural engagement and self-reflexivity, ethical ambiguities, sample sizes and so on.

In this paper, Laura will advance an argument that both develops and disrupts commonly held ethnographic approaches by providing a critical, methodological account of new social media approaches to prison research in Russia. She describes her role as a digital ethnographer. She then maps out how 'interneting' Russia's penal landscape creates a multiplication of opportunities that provide for greater cultural oxygen for prisoners through limitless virtual space and, at the same time, multiple dangers when ethnography is enabled by the lubricant of the internet.  The findings draw down from a UK Leverhulme study into the sociology of rights consciousness amongst Russian prisoners who are engaging in online prisoner blogging using illicit communication devices. Laura will examine how the researcher exercises power through emphasising the ontological awareness of knowledge production. In describing Russian prisoners online as producing both 'participant absent' and 'cultural citizens', she will interrogate the problem and pitfalls for online prisoner bloggers as 'research subjects'.

Further information about this and related work – as well as contact details for Laura can found here