Vanessa Long

Vanessa is a researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. She is currently working on the Oral History of Radical Lawyering project. 

Vanessa holds a PhD from the University of Sussex, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her doctoral research explored social class inequality in the criminal justice system via an ethnographic study of the Magistrates' Court. Using Bourdieu's theory of class, and particularly his conception of 'misrecognition', the thesis considered how perceptions of the social class of court actors (including defendants, lawyers and magistrates) might be misinterpreted within the court environment. Vanessa also holds an MSc in Social Research Methods, an LLM and an LLB and is a qualified barrister, having practiced predominantly in the family and criminal courts.