Three new Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowships for Oxford Law
The Faculty of Law is delighted to announce three new Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellows, who will be based in Oxford over the course of their three-year projects. The new awards support research across a range of themes, from biometric identification and migration to punishment, nationhood, and women’s lives after prison.
Dr Sabina Barone’s project, ‘Coding belonging: biometric IDs, diasporic lives, and migration management between Senegal and Guinea’, will examine how biometric identification in West Africa impacts sense of belonging for diasporic communities. Combining socio-legal, anthropological and decolonial approaches, the project will investigate how biometric IDs mediate state power and the ways in which people understand and assert their own identities. Dr Barone joins Oxford Law from UCL and will be based in the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.
Dr Cara Hunter’s project, ‘Punishment and nationhood: exploring penal struggle in “Brexit Britain”’, will explore the relationship between political community and punishment in England, Scotland and Wales. Using narrative inquiry, the project will look at how penal reformers and abolitionists resist, embrace or rewrite ideas of nationhood in efforts to influence state punishment. Dr Hunter joins Oxford Law from the University of Edinburgh and will be based in the Centre for Criminology.
Dr Kanupriya Sharma’s project, ‘Desistance, Moral Belonging, and Women’s Lives After Prison in Postcolonial India’, will study the post-release lives of women convicted of serious violent offences. Following women as they move from prison into open camps and the community, the project will examine how family ties, caste hierarchies, and expectations around marriage shape resettlement and belonging, and how, for some women, punishment may continue beyond the prison itself. By centring experiences largely marginal to mainstream criminological scholarship, the project will offer a feminist and culturally grounded account of life after prison and examine how research from postcolonial contexts can reshape understandings of women’s punishment, desistance and reintegration. Dr Sharma joins Oxford Law from the University of Nottingham and will be based in the Centre for Criminology.
The Faculty congratulates all three researchers on their Leverhulme Trust awards and looks forward to welcoming them to Oxford over the coming months.