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Sophie Anson

Department, Institution: Law, Birkbeck
UBEL Pathway: Law, Socio-legal studies and Criminology
Supervisor: Professor Stewart Motha and Dr Bernard Keenan
Contact details: sanson02@student.bbk.ac.uk
About Me

I am a PhD student in the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London. Originally from Newcastle upon Tyne, I moved to Cambridge in 2018 where I completed both a BA in Human, Social, and Political Sciences and an MPhil in the Sociology of Media and Culture.

 

Prior to starting my PhD I worked in Higher Education Outreach, with a particular focus on improving university access and outcomes for young people underserved by their home or educational settings.

In addition to my research, I am also interested in the ethical and legal implications of algorithmic and predictive policing, facial recognition technology, and crowdsourced digital investigations.

In my spare time I enjoy scrapbooking, interior design, and learning more about the London transport network.

My Research

My research will be examining how discussions of crime and disorder on location-based social media (e.g. Nextdoor, WhatsApp, and Facebook) impact users’ perception and navigation of their neighbourhoods and local communities.

The digital context has transformed citizen-led policing in the UK, mobilising individuals and groups to record, report and ultimately police their own communities. Tracing the ways these digital communities govern orientation to public space, the project puts sociolegal frameworks of spatial governmentality into conversation with the more recent work of critical criminologists and geographers mapping the extension of carceral logics and practices into everyday routines and architectures.

Impact of My Research

Beyond its theoretical contributions, this work could influence methodological debates on issues of privacy, anonymity and visibility in the digital sphere. I welcome knowledge exchange with interdisciplinary digital researchers, especially those using ethnographic methods across both social media and physical locality.