Professor Laura Piacentini
Social Work and Social Policy
Personal statement
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 thirty 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 www.sccjr.ac.uk
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).
On Twitter:
In the Gulag's Shadow (ESRC): @InGulag
Criminal and Social Justice cluster: @CrimSocJust
Personal account@LauraPiac8
Area of Expertise
- Global Criminology
- Sociology and Social Theory
- Prisons in the former Soviet Union
- International prisons and penal reform
- Prison ethnography and qualitative research methods
- Human rights in prisons
Prize And Awards
Publications
Research Interests
Research:
Laura is recognised, through publications, impact, elite grant capture and academic awards as a world leading Criminologist. She has been publishing in the area of contemporary Russian imprisonment since 1995, having lived and conducted research in numerous prisons. She is a trained Russian speaker.
All her work multi-disciplinary and involves substantial leadership of international teams involving the subjects of sociology, Russian Area Studies, history, human rights and political science. I am committed to radical, feminist, creative and theoretically informed research methods.
Research grants
Laura has been PI or Co-I on many grants and have completed several major ESRC studies on Russian prisons:
Grants funded by the ESRC
- "In The Gulag's Shadow: Producing, Consuming and Percieving Prisons in the Former USSR)" (2018-2021), Principal Investigator (£735k). The study is the first study of its kind in world Criminology. The team includes Dr Gavin Slade (Lead Co-I and Associate Professor, University of Nazarbayev, Astana, Kazakhstan); Professor Elena Olmenchenko (Professor of Sociology, Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg), and Professor Alexei Trochev (Professor of Criminology, University of Nazarbayev, Astana, Kazakhstan).
- "Regulating Justice: The dynamics of compliance and breach in criminal justice social work in Scotland", Co-I, with Dr Monica Barry (Law, PI) and Dr Beth Weaver (Social Work and Social Policy, Co-I), 2012-2014, £206k.
- "Women in the Russian Penal System: The role of distance in the theory and practice of imprisonment in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia"(ESRC, 2006-2010, £253,000, with Professor Judith Pallot (Oxford, PI) and Dr Dominique Moran, University of Birmingham, Co-I).
- "Work to Live: The Function of Prison Labour in Russian Prisons" (1997-2001) (ESRC, PI, £45,000);
Grants funded by the AHRC
- "The Right to Health in Brazilian and Scottish Prisons", 2018-2020 (AHRC and MRC, £180,000), Co-I and Professor Sally Haw (PI).
Grants funded by the Leverhulme Trust
- "Towards a Sociology of rights consciousness amongst Russian prisoners" (Principal Investigator, £45,000).
Knowledge Exchange: Laura has advised the United Nations and NGOs on subjects that include forced labour in prisons and Russian political prisoners and asylum seekers. She has advised the Scottish Parliament on rehabilitation in prisons and given papers at diverse international Universities including the University of Nazarbayev, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, the University of Harvard, The Higher Education Institute of Smolensk and Moscow State University. She has taught at Russian prison service training colleges, Russian police colleges and at the Central European University, Budapest.
Professional Activities
Projects
Contact
Professor
Laura
Piacentini
Social Work and Social Policy
Email: laura.piacentini@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 444 8703