Visiting Fellow: Professor Michelle Brown, University of Tennessee, USA
Hosted By: Professor Sarah Armstrong
Date of Visit: Mid-June to mid-July 2022
Purpose of Visit: Professor Michelle Brown is an internationally renowned critical carceral and visual criminologist, and a scholar activist on transformative justice. She will be a SPS Visiting Fellow in residence at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR).
Her visit develops comparative dimensions of her work, bringing a high profile visitor to Glasgow, providing world class scholarly engagement with its staff and student community. As a Visiting Fellow she will be participating in a range of activities, including talks, informal meetings and workshops.
Bio: Michelle Brown is a critical criminologist and visual scholar with an interdisciplinary background in the humanities and social sciences. Her research derives from over 20 years of fieldwork and teaching in US prisons, working closely with the imprisoned and formerly incarcerated, prison workers, victim survivors, their families, and community organisers at the height of mass incarceration.
Her earlier work chronicles the era of mass incarceration, including the cultural politics of privilege, distance, and accountability in the expansion of the carceral state. She also worked extensively with image archives (film, television, photographs, internet and new media), artist collectives, and community organizers focused upon countervisual practices and strategies – how we unsee prisons, police, and empires in order to build emancipatory practices and institutions.
Michelle is the author of The Culture of Punishment (NYUP, 2009) and co-author of Criminology Goes to the Movies (with Nicole Rafter; NYUP, 2011); the co-editor of Media Representations of September 11 (Praeger, 2003), The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology (2017; w/Eamonn Carrabine), the Palgrave MacMillan Crime, Media and Culture Book Series, and the Sage journal Crime Media Culture; and the senior editor for The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture (2018). She received the best article prize from Theoretical Criminology in 2014 for her piece titled “Visual Criminology and Carceral Studies” and was named Critical Criminologist of the Year in 2016 by the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology.