Dr Phil Crockett Thomas

she/her

Phil is undertaking an ISRF Independent Scholar Fellowship 07: Prison Break: Imagining Alternatives to Prison in the UK, co-hosted by the School of Social and Political Sciences and the School of Critical Studies (Creative Writing), University of Glasgow. This inventive project invites people variously engaged in prison abolition to ‘time travel’ to a future UK in which prisons no longer exist, and to craft science-fiction about how prisons were abolished and what came after.

Building on the political consensus that prison does not diminish social harm, the project uses a novel creative method, ‘fictioning’, to re-imagine prison and the future of justice in the UK.

Phil previously worked at the SCCJR as the research associate on the Distant Voices project (2017-2022): an ESCR-funded collaborative project. Phil has a PhD in Visual Sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London entitled ‘In Different Voices: A Practice-based Intervention into the Assemblage of Crime’ (2018), funded by the AHRC. Alongside more traditional approaches, her research methodology includes creative writing and making films.

Her key research interests are the sociology of punishment and justice, poststructuralist and feminist philosophy, science and technology studies, and collaborative and creative research methods.

Recent publications

Crockett Thomas P (2021) Writing Sociological Crime Fiction: You Will Have Your Day in Court. Art/Research International 6(1): 218-250. https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29549.

Crockett Thomas, P, McNeill, F, Cathcart Frödén, L, Collinson Scott, J, Escobar, O and Urie, A (2021) Re-writing punishment? Songs and narrative problem-solving. Incarceration 2(1). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26326663211000239

Crockett Thomas P (2020) Stir: Poetic field works from the Distant Voices project. Crime, Media, Culture (00)0 (Online First), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659020970994.