Dr Martha O'Carroll

I am an ESRC-funded postdoctoral fellow. My current work focuses on histories and legacies of prison resistance, prisoner rights movements and abolitionism in Scotland. By facilitating engagement with these histories, I aim to build more critical understandings of penal reform today and support the development of strategies for alleviating the harm of the criminal justice system and our reliance on it.

My PhD, completed at the University of Glasgow, critically evaluated Scottish community justice policy and explored past and present movements seeking radical transformations of the Scottish penal state. My work is motivated and informed by my experience working in the criminal justice voluntary sector and my involvement in anti-carceral organising. Research interests include: critical carceral studies and abolitionist theory; policy and discourses of care and progressiveness; social movement histories and archiving; and relationships between the state and social movements.