I have an interest in investigating social and institutional reactions to behaviour deemed to be criminal or harmful, particularly within a transnational context, where issues of normative conflict emerge. Recently I have resumed studying state policies on migration focusing specifically on detention in Northern Ireland, and the movement for migrant's rights in Italy in the 90s and early 2000.  

Key Words

penal power and sovereignty, immigration detention, securitization processes, war/conflict, harm and in general issues of social change. In all of these I priviledge a critical and feminist perspective.

Supervision

I d be very happy to hear of your interests in related areas and discuss possible research projects.

Current PhD Supervision: 

Previous PhD supervision:

• Jason McKillen (LINAS grant): "Who Designs AI Security Systems? The co-production of artificial intelligence-enabled security tools in Europe, 2016-2023" (First Supervisor): successful (minor corrections)
• Angela Rogan (ESRC grant 1+3): "Navigating Social and Epistemic Harms: The Role of Facebook in Women's Health Activism Against Essure" (First Supervisor); successful {minor corrections}
• Richard Montague (Dfe funding) “Challenging Hate Crime in a Divided City” (Second Supervisor): successful (minor corrections)
• Carey Doyle, (Dfe funding) “Migration, Planning and Super-diversity in Rural Northern Ireland and England” (Second Supervisor): Successful (minor corrections)

I have recently co-authored (with Francesca Esposito and Annika Lindberg) an edited collection to Bristol University Press entitled Detention and deportation in Europe: Analyses, contestations, and radical visions in the aftermath of Covid-19. This is the fruit of collaboration and exchanges between scholars, artists and activists. 

My monograph entitled War as protection and punishment. Armed Intervention at the 'end of history' (Routledge, 2023) was nominated for the British Society of Criminology book prize by Routledge. It draws partly from my PHD thesis. The PhD analyzed the punitive use of military force in the post 9/11 'war on terror' context with particular reference to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It investigated the overlap of criminology and international relations, the use of war, or the threat of it, as a means of punishing and establishing order, thus defining borders in the international sphere. The new monograph expands that framework to understand the punitive logics behind the so called liberal military interventions considering their trajectory from Kosovo, to Iraq and finally to Libya. It draws on previous analyses on the continuum between the inside and the outside, the use of military might and policing power, by looking at the punitive affects that were part of these imperial ventures. Further, it explored how these operations aimed at disciplining local state institutions with the aim of governing the local population through the state structure. Overall, it shows the contradiction, tensions and ambiguities that these military interventions created in the local areas.

In 2013-2014 I contributed to a research project aimed at studying the ways in which particular notions of risk, uncertainty and insecurity were  inscribed within the construction of an handheld security technology to detect CBRNE at the european border (with QUB colleagues).

Before my PhD on the war on terror, I worked on prostitution, theoretically on some criminalising/victimizing feminist understanding of prostitution, and empirically on crimes committed against female migrants by criminal organizations, in the context of Italy's restrictive migration regimes in the 1990s and early 2000. Further, I was involved into an enquiry into issues of youth prostitution in the region of Emilia Romagna (Italy) and studied court judgements on trafficking of women from Eastern Europe. This was part of the European Project Stop Trafficking in Europe. Shortly after that, I was involved in a research project on the 'second generation' migrants in Emilia Romagna (Italy).

Education/ Academic Qualifications

Law Degree, University of Bologna (Italy): First Class

MA Criminology and Research Method, Keele University, UK

PhD Ulster University, Northern Ireland

Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Educational Teaching, Queen's University Belfast.

Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

In 2023 I was awarded the Emma Goldman Award from the Flax Foundation, in recognition of the substantial contribution, engagement and future potential of my research to knowledge on feminist and inequality issues in Europe. As a result of that in the same year I was awarded the IWM residency in Vienna (Austria). In 2014-2015 I was a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Law and Society, in UC Berkeley (California), in 2018 at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Germany), and in 2022 a visiting scientist at the University of Turin (Italy). As a student I was a visiting scholar at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (New York) and while an Erasmus student at Rotterdam University (with Rene van Swaaningen), I attended also a course on Historiography of Feminist Ideas with Rosi Braidotti in the Women's Studies Centre at Utrecht University (Netherlands).

Currently

CRM 2001 Criminological Theory (designer, convenor, lecturer and tutor)

CRM3007 Criminology Across Borders (Designer, Convenor, Lecturer and tutor)

SOC9071 Algorithms and Society (MA level) (Designer, Convenor and Lecturer)

In the past

SOC1005 Digital Society

CRM1001 Introduction to Criminology

CRM1002 Exploring Criminology

CRM3002 Research Dissertation. 

CRM2008 Development of Policing (Interrnational Policing)

CRM3002 Research Project and Dissertation (Literature Review).

EDU8102 Theories, Frameworks and Concepts (MA level)

SOC9024 Key Issues in Social Theory (Governmentality Theory)- MA level