Rachele Girardi

Dr Rachele Girardi is a postdoctoral researcher in Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her work sits at the intersections of feminist and queer criminology, carceral geography, gender studies, and prison abolition. She is particularly interested in exploring how normative notions of gender and sexuality inform criminal justice processes and affect the criminalisation and victimisation of marginalised communities.

Her work on female prison spaces is informed by the abolitionist tradition,  feminist and queer criminological research, and the use of creative methods to explore lived experience of the criminal justice system. Her PhD research, "Locked Behind Gendered Bars: Exploring the Heteronormative Regulation of Female Prison Spaces in England", investigates women’s prisons by focusing on how space influences strategies of gendered control. The project highlights the marginalising consequences of existing strategies of gendered control in prison, embedding the analysis in abolitionist thinking and imagination, and pointing towards the expressions of everyday resistance and transformation that can contest the broader prison system. Her current work develops gender-responsive, trauma-informed, and intersectionality-informed approaches to prison research, with particular interests in creative methods, emotional mapping, and the possibilities for building alternatives to carceral systems. Her work has appeared in Gender, Place & Culture and the Journal of Gender Studies. She holds a PhD in Law (2025) and an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Psychology (2019) from the University of Greenwich, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences (2016) from VUB.