The European Society of Criminology has awarded the 2018 ESC Young Criminologist Award to Anastasia Chamberlen in recognition of her article ‘Embodying Prison Pain: Women’s experiences of self-injury in prison and the emotions of punishment’, published in 2016 in Theoretical Criminology (Vol. 20, Issue 2). According to the European Society of Criminology website: "The European Society of Criminology awards annually two scholarly awards for career contributions by a European criminologist and for an outstanding article by a younger European criminologist. The ESC Young Criminologist Award recognises an outstanding article by a European criminologist who was 35-years-old or younger when the article was published. [The jury consists of] three members proposed by the Editorial Board of the European Journal of Criminology to the ESC Executive Board. "

The awarding jury considered that "in this article, Anastasia Chamberlen explores the meanings and motivations of self-injury practices as disclosed in interviews with a group of female former prisoners in England. In considering their testimonies through a feminist perspective, she illuminates aspects of their experiences of imprisonment that go beyond the ‘pains of imprisonment’ literature. Specifically, she examines their accounts of self-injury with a focus on the embodied aspects of their experiences. In so doing, she highlights the materiality of the emotional harms of their prison experiences and suggests that the pains of imprisonment are still very much inscribed on and expressed through the prisoner’s body. This paper advances a more theoretically situated, interdisciplinary critique of punishment drawn from medical sociological, phenomenological and feminist scholarship."

The committee "particularly emphasize[d] the comparative strengths of the paper regarding originality of its research question, interdisciplinary approach, methodology (qualitative) and clarity of thought through excellent expression" and noted that this was Anastasia's first peer-reviewed academic article at a top Criminology journal and at the time of publication she was 28 years old.

Congratulations to our very own Anastasia Chamberlen!