Dr Anastasia Chamberlen has received the European Society of Criminology 2018 Young Criminologist Award in recognition of her work on women’s experiences of prison.

Each year the European Society of Criminology makes two scholarly awards, one for career contributions by a European criminologist and one for an outstanding article by a European criminologist 35-years-old or younger when the article was published.

Dr Chamberlen’s award was made 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. This was Dr Chamberlen’s first peer-reviewed academic article in a top Criminology journal. At the time of publication she was 28 years old.

Making the award, the ESC jury said: "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 awards committee commended the originality of Dr Chamberlen’s research, her interdisciplinary approach, use of qualitative methodology and her clarity of thought. They also commented that “in addition to this article, [Dr Chamberlen] has several other interesting publications to her name.”

Dr Chamberlen said: “I’m very happy and honoured to receive this award and I’m very grateful to the ESC awards committee for their generous comments.”

• Dr Chamberlen has recently published a monograph with Oxford University Press. Embodying Punishment: Emotions, Identities and Lived Experiences in Women’s Prisons expands on the same project on women’s experiences of imprisonment.

4 September 2018

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