Dr Alana Barton is a Reader in Criminology in the Department of Law and Criminology, Edge Hill University. Her research and teaching interests include the politics of punishment, critical histories of crime and punishment, theoretical developments in criminology (specifically agnotology and zemiology), prisons and prison tourism, reality TV and the 'war on the poor'. Her book ‘Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities: Two Centuries of Semi-Penal Institutionalisation for Women’ was published by Ashgate in 2005 and was nominated for the Hart Socio-Legal Studies Award and the British Society of Criminology Book Prize. She is co-editor of ‘Expanding the Criminological Imagination: Critical Readings in Criminology’ which was published by Willan in 2007 and 'Ignorance, Power and Harm: Agnotology and the Criminological Imagination' (with Dr. Howard Davis, 2018). She has worked on large-scale research projects and has presented papers at numerous academic conferences in the UK, USA, Canada, Greece and Russia. She has co-edited five special editions of the Prison Service Journal (with Dr Alyson Brown) and is currently working on publications examining the challenges to the ‘criminological imagination’ posed by neo-liberal shifts in education and society and the usefulness of agnotology (the study of ignorance) and zemiology (study of social harm) for criminology.