Holly Bird

Holly Bird is a Scottish researcher and writer and a first-year PhD student in criminology at the University of Glasgow. Her PhD, provisionally titled ‘“Pop-up prisons”, carceral change, and penal expansion(ism)’, is fully funded by a four-year studentship from the ESRC through the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, and will focus on carceral expansion in the UK – particularly through the development of ‘rapid deployment cells’. This research aims to explore the relationships between the state and the private sector companies contracted and subcontracted to design, build, and assemble these structures, and to theorise the ways in which commitments to large-scale prison construction fit within a wider political, ideological, and historical picture of penal expansion.

Holly holds a Master’s in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Oxford (2021, Distinction), which was funded by a St Cross Divisional Scholarship, and an LLB in Law and French from the University of Edinburgh (2019, First Class), where she was awarded the McClintock Prize for Criminology and the Joelle Godard Prize.

Before beginning her PhD, Holly worked as a researcher at the Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (University of Strathclyde). She was previously based in London as Research and Policy Officer at StopWatch, a Black-led organisation that aims to use evidence, litigation, and the lived experience of racialised communities to understand the impacts of disproportionate policing (primarily but not exclusively through the lens of stop and search) and to advocate for effective public safety practices.

She is also a freelance researcher and writer, having worked on a range of criminal justice issues such as women’s problem-solving courts, stop and search and the (ab)use and of police powers, civil-criminal hybrid legal orders (in particular, serious violence reduction orders and knife crime prevention orders), and deaths in custody.