Vanessa Lynn Barker Professor of Sociology

Vanessa Barker is Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University, former Editor in Chief of Punishment & Society, Researcher at Just Exports project, the University of Oslo, Advisor to Border Criminologies at the University of Oxford, international collaborator on Crafting Resilience at Leiden University. Her research focuses on questions of democracy and border control, nationalism and criminal justice, right-wing legal mobilization, border criminologies, and the role of civil society in social change. She teaches courses on qualitative research methods, globalization, and introduction to sociology.

Her book Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order: Walling the Welfare State examines the border closing in Sweden during the height of the refugee crisis and the rise of penal nationalism in response to mass mobility. She is the author of a number of academic articles, including pieces on Nordic Exceptionalism, nationalism, the American crime decline, border control, civic repair, and mass imprisonment, including her first book The Politics of Imprisonment. She has been a visiting academic at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford and a visiting fellow at the Law & Public Affairs Program (LAPA) at Princeton University. Her work has received grants and awards from Riksbanken, the National Science Foundation and the American Scandinavian Foundation. She served on the Board of Trustees for the Law & Society Association, as Co-editor for the Howard Journal of Crime & Justice, as book review editor for Punishment & Society, and Associate Editor of Theoretical Criminology. She completed her doctoral degree at New York University and worked at Florida State University before moving to Sweden.