Rachele Girardi

Rachele Girardi

Post Graduate Research Student

Rachele has a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the VUB in Brussels, and a Master’s degree in Criminology and Criminal Psychology from the University of Greenwich. She started a PhD in Law in January 2022, encouraged by her interests in queer studies and academic research, as well as the support of lecturers from the School of Law and Criminology.

Rachele is a PGR Teaching Assistant at the University of Greenwich, teaching criminology modules for undergraduate and postgraduate students. She is a lecturer for the module ‘The Psychology of Crime and Justice in the UK’, at the Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA) in London.

Rachele’s research interests focus on gender and feminist studies, queer criminological research, carceral geography, prison studies and abolitionist work.

Awards

Best Postgraduate Criminology Dissertation 2021 – University of Greenwich

Best Postgraduate Gender and Sexuality Related Dissertation 2021 – University of Greenwich

Blue Tirohl Prize 2022 – Journal of Gender Studies, Taylor and Francis

Research / Scholarly interests

Locked behind gendered bars: exploring the heteronormative regulation of female prison spaces.

My PhD project explores the gendered regulation in women’s prisons by investigating how space influences strategies of social control. The theoretical framework employed bridges the fields of Queer Criminology and Carceral Geography to understand the relationship between imprisoned bodies and carceral spaces. The methods employed include a document analysis of governmental and non-governmental prison reports, and semi-structured interviews with prison designers, charity organizations, and individuals with lived experience of the women’s prison system in the UK. The aim of this project is to demonstrate how the detrimental consequences of heteronormative regulation in women’s prisons not only affect gender non-conforming individuals, but everyone who experiences incarceration, thus drawing our attention towards abolitionist thinking and transformative endeavours to defund the prison industrial complex

Recent publications

Girardi, R. (2024). The ubiquity of gender and the hiddenness of agency: looking inside women’s prisons in England. Gender, Place & Culture, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2024.2404890

Girardi, R. (2022). ‘It’s easy to mistrust police when they keep on killing us’: A queer exploration of police violence and LGBTQ+ Victimization. Journal of Gender Studies, 31(7), 852-862. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2021.1979481

Girardi, R. (2023) An interview with Rachele Girardi. Journal of Gender Studies, 32(1), 3-5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2023.2154961