Advisory Board

The Advisory Board supports the Committee in running the Carceral Geography Working Group, and expanding our network and activities.

Our Advisory Board members are:

Ella Bytheway-Jackson

Ella Bytheway-Jackson is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool. She researches the carceral traits and dynamics of care and control in Poor Law children’s homes and workhouses in Birkenhead at the turn of the twentieth century. Ella co-organises our Early Career Perspectives seminar series.

James Gacek

James Gacek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at the University of Regina. He holds his PhD in Criminology from Edinburgh Law School at the University of Edinburgh. Drawing upon criminology and carceral geography, his PhD project focused upon the regulation of inmates through law, state surveillance and community corrections in the UK. Under the supervision of Professor Rose Ricciardelli, he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

He continues to extensively publish in reviews, journals and international fora, particularly in areas of (1) corrections and community justice; (2) green criminology; and (3) the broader socio-politics of judicial reasoning. With Professor Richard Jochelson, he has recently co-authored Criminal Law and Precrime: Legal Studies in Canadian Punishment and Surveillance in Anticipation of Criminal Guilt (2018, Routledge) and co-edited Sexual Regulation and the Law: A Canadian Perspective (2019, Demeter Press). He is currently the co-editor of the Manitoba Law Journal (RobsonCrim Edition) and continues to peer review submissions for Critical Criminology, Punishment & Society, and The European Journal of Criminology, among others.

As an Advisory Board Member, James co-organises events for early career researchers.

Christophe Mincke

Christophe Mincke is Director of the criminology department at the (Belgian) National Institute for Forensic Sciences and Criminology (NICC), Professor at Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Bruxelles, Belgium. He has developed the concept of “mobilitarian ideal” to analyse the contemporary relation to mobility of Western societies. Through four imperatives (activity, activation, participation, adaptation), social actors are demanded to constantly move in a decompartmentalised space. He tracks traces of this ideology in the field of imprisonment justification, using empirical material from parliamentary documents pertaining to the new Belgian penitentiary law to show how imprisonment is conceived, nowadays, as a mobility challenge.

In his Advisory Board role, Christophe contributes to conference organising and co-organises the Explorations in Carceral Geography seminar series.

Hannah Stevens

Hannah Stevens is an independent scholar. She co-organises our Early Career Perspectives seminar series and supports CGWG with social media outreach, event planning, and building relationships with non-academic audiences.

Franck Ollivon

Franck Ollivon is an assistant professor in geography at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris). His research interests revolve around probation, parole and community sentences. His past and present work seek to question the link between custodial and non-custodial forms of punishment. As an Advisory Board Member, Franck co-organises the Explorations in Carceral Geography seminar series.

Lara Palombo

Lara Palombo is a sessional lecturer and tutor working across the disciplines of Cultural and Media Studies, Gender Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University and University of New South Wales. Drawing from critical race and whiteness theories in Gender and Cultural Studies, Lara completed her PhD in 2015 on the historical elevation and mutations of Camps of indefinite incarceration as part of the violent territorialisation of settler colonial Australia (1830s to 1945). Lara examined prison Camps as transnational imperial, racial and gendered technologies of violence deployed against Indigenous Peoples and racialised diaspora. Her current areas of research include settler colonialism and incarceration of migrant women; Universities and carceral infrustructures; the carceral imaginaries of media. Within the CGWG, Lara is a member of our prize assessment panel.

Deena Varner

Deena Varner is an interdisciplinary Americanist specialising in prison studies and cultural studies of the law. She holds a PhD in critical theory and cultural studies and teaches at Texas Tech University. Her research examines the cultural and spatial production of criminality and justice, and her current project focuses on the adjudication of misconduct, illegality, and criminality by disciplinary boards within public and private institutions. Her work on prisons and prisoners has appeared in journals such as Cultural Politics, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and the Journal of Historical Geography. As an Advisory Board Member, Deena serves as a book review editor.