Marion Vannier

Marion Vannier is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Manchester, an affiliated researcher at the University of Oxford, and a visiting researcher at CERDAP2 (Université Grenoble Alpes/Sciences Po Grenoble). She has held a UKRI Future Leader fellowship since 2022. Her research focuses on the sociology of punishment, criminal law, and human rights. Since the publication of her book, *Normalising Punishment: the case of life without parole in California*, by Oxford University Press (2021), Marion has continued to explore issues related to life imprisonment and, more broadly, the links between legal frameworks and empirical prison realities.
More recently, she has begun researching the notion of "hope" in prison among older individuals serving life sentences. The UKRI-funded research project focuses on the right to hope, a right first mentioned in the European Court of Human Rights judgment, Vinter v. United Kingdom (2013). It traces the trajectory of this right, from its formulation by the ECHR to its implementation at the national and local levels, in court and in prison. In short, the research empirically explores human rights as they are practiced and experienced in prison. The aim is to assess how certain humanitarian precepts or ideals can be distorted from their original purpose.