معرفی
Professor Sarah Armstrong is a distinguished academic at the University of Glasgow's College of Social Sciences, Department of Sociological & Cultural Studies. She serves as a Professor and has held significant leadership roles including Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (2016-19). As Co-editor-in-Chief of the journal Crime Media Culture, she maintains an influential position in criminological scholarship. Her office is located at R315 Level 3, Sccjr, Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson Street, and she can be contacted at Sarah.Armstrong@glasgow.ac.uk.
Dr. Armstrong's research focuses on prisons, prisoners, and criminal justice, exploring questions about the governance, organization, representation, and experiences of punishment. A key strand of her research examines policy as a key site and source of culture, and the specific bureaucratic qualities and logics that arise in penal institutions. She draws on diverse methods including ethnography, statistical analysis, semiotics, discourse and metaphor analysis, and evaluation. Her theoretical approach integrates anthropology of policy, human geography, ANT/STS, and critical theory. Currently, she is working on the Paper Cuts: Prisons, Bureaucracy and Violence project, exploring structural and administrative violence in prison and relating this to bureaucratic forms of organization generally. During the pandemic, she co-led the Scotland in Lockdown study, conducting rapid research on the impact of lockdown for groups already facing isolation.
Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on prison deaths, fatal accident inquiries, and the impact of the pandemic on marginalized communities. The research trajectory shows increasing attention to structural violence in penal institutions, bureaucratic processes in corrections, and the intersection of pandemic restrictions with criminal justice systems. She frequently collaborates with researchers across Scotland and internationally, often through the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
Dr. Armstrong has received funding from prestigious sources including the Economic and Social Research Council, Leverhulme Trust, Adam Smith Research Foundation, Chief Scientist Office Scottish Government, Third Sector organisations, and the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
She currently supervises numerous PhD students working on diverse topics including penal reform, prisoner health outcomes, vulnerability of prisoners, media's role in justice processes, racialization of law enforcement, and child abuse inquiries. Her completed students have researched family experiences of prisoners, police culture, young people with incarcerated family members, procedural justice, and cultural object trafficking.
