Contact
Biography
Dr Catherine (Cathie) Traynor is a post-doctoral research fellow on the UKRI funded, SAFESOC project, which aims to reconceptualise prison regulation for safer societies.
Her main interests include legal and political geography, court ethnography, prison regulation and governance and the criminal justice voluntary sector. She is currently empirically researching the inevitability of blame in Prison and Probation Ombudsman (prisoner) death investigations, and the potential for assemblage and actor network theory in inter(national) prison regulation.
Cathie has diverse experience of the criminal justice system (domestically and internationally, in prisons and in courts, as an employee, a researcher and a volunteer). She completed her PhD in Human Geography at the University of Leicester (2017). Prior to that, she worked as an organisational and leadership development specialist for the Scottish Prison Service, during which she completed an MSc in Social Anthropology (University of Edinburgh, 2004) and an MSc in Training and Human Resource Management (University of Leicester, 2000).
Her PhD developed 'a geography of neutrality', which added to current debates around emotions and affects, architecture, critical geopolitics and organisational anthropology. It involved ethnographic research in The Hague (including the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) and illustrated how 'staged insignificance' is core to the enactment of 'neutral' people, places and practices across scales.
She volunteers as a witness supporter for Victim Support Scotland.
Recent Publications