Dominic Aitken

Biography

Dominic is a DPhil Candidate in Criminology at Wadham College, researching responses to suicide in prisons and immigration removal centres. This project is supervised by Professor Mary Bosworth and supported by an ESRC 1+3 studentship in the Social Sciences Division.

In addition to his doctoral research, Dominic was a Research Assistant on Professor Bosworth's project Understanding Immigration Detention Staff, which examined the working lives of staff in Heathrow IRC, the UK's largest immigration removal centre. He was also involved in a knowledge exchange research project comparing immigration detention monitoring across European countries. 

He has been employed as a Sessional Lecturer at the School of Law, University of Reading and Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, in both cases teaching final year undergraduate modules on Criminology. He was a Tutor on the Sarah Lawrence Programme at Wadham College, teaching exchange students from the US liberal arts college, and worked on the Oxford Programme for Undergraduate Studies. He designed and delivered a seven-week course on Criminology & Criminal Justice, as well as a module on the Sociology of Punishment & Migration Control. He was a Student Editor for the Border Criminologies blog and has written several pieces for the Centre for Criminology blog.

Prior to his DPhil, Dominic completed the MSc in Criminology & Criminal Justice, receiving the Roger Hood Prize for the top Distinction in his year. His Masters thesis was subsequently shortlisted for the 2016 John Sunley Prize. In 2014, he obtained a First Class Honours LLB from the University of Edinburgh, along with the prestigious Lord President Cooper Memorial Prize, awarded to the top undergraduate in Law. His research interests include the sociology of punishment, migration control, and the politics of crime and justice.