ERC RaRiE PhD Scholarship - Rehabilitation and Reintegration: Technologies, practices and experiences

Project details

This PhD project is one of three within a European Research Council Advanced Grant project entitled Rehabilitation and Reintegration in Europe (RaRiE), led by Professor Fergus McNeill with colleagues in the Universities of Leiden and Oslo.

By examining evidence from three countries that are often considered ‘progressive’ in penal policy and practice terms (the Netherlands, Norway and Scotland), the RaRiE project aims to help us better understand whether and where rehabilitation lives up to its ideals, and to creatively, critically and comparatively interrogate its development and prospects, its coherences and contradictions, its rhetoric and its realities, its pitfalls and its possibilities.  Through a new approach called Dialogical Comparative Penology (DCP), building on the interdisciplinary approaches that used by the investigators in a series of innovative, high-impact research projects, RaRiE will provide a uniquely comprehensive analysis of the nature and impact of rehabilitation in these three nations. It will also develop new tools and metrics for critically assessing rehabilitative systems and practices, to better direct their future development. In and through dialogue with policymakers, senior leaders in prison and probation systems, practitioners, activists and people with lived experience of rehabilitation, RaRiE will help to improve the fairness and effectiveness of European penal systems. RaRiE’s ambition -- the ‘step-change’ it offers – lies both in developing a new approach to comparative penology, and in using that new approach to reshape how rehabilitation is understood and developed in Europe.

Across 4 ‘work packages’, the RaRiE project will:

1. Examine how the rehabilitative ideal has been understood, constructed, contested and represented in each country;
2. map and measure the scale and shape of rehabilitation as it exists and is pursued in each country, and at what cost;
3. examine and assess how and to what extent, rehabilitation is operationalised via technologies (including tools and techniques) in each country; and
4. explore how rehabilitation is understood and experiences by those directly involved in its everyday practices (i.e. those practising and those undergoing rehabilitation) in each country.

PhD researchers in Glasgow, Leiden and Oslo will conduct within-country studies related to work packages 3 and 4. They will also have opportunities to engage with project partners, to work with diverse participants, and to participate in comparative aspects of the study. Further details of the project’s aims, research questions, methods and outputs will be made available to short-listed applicants but, in sum, this Glasgow-based PhD will use qualitative methods (primarily interviews) to address the following questions:

• How and in what forms is rehabilitaiton in Scotland operationalised via new and old technologies?
• How is rehabilitation in Scotland understoos and experienced by those dir3ectly involved in its everyday practices (i.e. those designing, those practicising, and those undergoing rehabilitaiton)?

Eligibility

Applicants must meet the following eligibility criteria:

• Applicants will have a good Masters degree (or overseas equivalent) in Criminology or closely related discipline.
• Applicants will have a demonstratable interest in and knowledge of rehabilitation and reintegration research.
• Applicants must be able to commit to study full-time only.
• The successful applicant will be Glasgow-based, but must also be able to travel internationally (to participate in the wider project ot which the PhD contributes).
• Applicants must meet the criteria to be eligible for Home fees.

Please note that all applicants must also meet the entry requirements for the Criminology, PhD. 

Award details

The scholarship is available as a full-time +4 (4 year) PhD programme only. The programme commencement date is flexible but will begin no earlier than March 2026 and no later than May 2026. The funding includes:

• An annual stipend at the UKRI rate
• Fees at the standard home fee rate only
• Students can also draw on a Research Training Support Grant, usually up to a maximum of £940 per year (in the first 3 years of a PhD only)
• Funding of direct fieldwork costs and, where required, of particpation in international meetings and conferences will be provided via the project grant.