Gender, Geography, and Punishment

Judith Pallot has developed an interest in the Russian penal nystem, previously her work focused on the historical geography of the Russian peasantry and post-Soviet rural adaptations. She has researched extensively in Russian archives and also in the field. She is the author of several books, three with OUP, on rural Russia and numerous articles in scholarly journals and she has held several large grants from UK funding councils. With her current AHRC grant she is extending her interest in women's relationship with the Russian penal system to explore the experiences of the 'wives, mothers and daughters' of Russia's large prison population and she is also engaged in a project to map to the gulag (www.gulagmaps.org). She is Professor of the Human Geography of Russia and Official Student of Christ Church in the University of Oxford. Laura Piacentini is the first Criminologist and scholar to conduct empirical and theoretical research in Russian prisons and has been researching prisons in Russia since 1997, having visited some 20 penal colonies and lived within the regimes in Siberia and in Western Russia. A Russian speaker, her work explores a variety of penological problems including the changing nature of prison labour, human rights and the conceptual shifts in punishment ideology and practices in the post-Soviet period. She is Reader in Criminology at Strathclyde Law School, The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.