Rate My Professor Lara Palombo

Dr. Lara Palombo is a Lecturer in Criminology in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology within the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University. She holds a BA (Hons), an MA in Gender Studies, and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Macquarie University, completing her doctorate in 2015 with a thesis titled 'The Racial Camp and the Production of the Political Citizen: A Genealogy of Contestation from Indigenous Populations and Diasporic Women.' This research examined historical mutations of camps of indefinite incarceration and their impacts on racialized communities and women. Throughout her academic career at Macquarie University, Palombo has served as Associate Lecturer (Teaching and Leadership) in the School of International Studies, Academic Casual in Macquarie Law School and the School of Communication, Society and Culture, and is affiliated with the Housing and Urban Research Centre. She convenes and lectures in units such as Global Crime and Justice, Media, Representation and Crime, and Transnational Crime.

Palombo's interdisciplinary research centers on spaces, practices, and technologies of incarceration, with specializations in settler colonial penal governance, transnational penal technologies, incarceration of migrants and diasporic women, and media carceral imaginaries. She is currently investigating prisons and media carceral imaginaries during and post-COVID. Her work employs critical frameworks including feminist and critical race theory, intersectionality, anti-colonial and decolonial approaches, infrastructural theory, transformative justice, and abolition. Key publications include 'Indigenous media and the countering of the racial insular imaginary in settler-colonial Australia' (2021, chapter in Voices of Challenge in Australia's Migrant and Minority Press), 'Racial penal governance in Australia and moments of appearance: disrupting disappearance and visibilizing women on the inside' (2020, Globalizations), 'The Fistful of Flies: A Feminist Hyphenated Disruption and Transformation of Biopolitical Interpellation' (2014, Journal of Intercultural Studies), 'Biometrics: bodies, technologies, biopolitics' (2011, Social Identities), and 'The Drawing of the Sovereign Line' (2010, chapter in Transmediterranean). As an Italian migrant, she has chaired the NSW Immigrant Womens SpeakOut Association, served on the board of the Women in Prison Advocacy Network, and currently acts as Secretary of the international Carceral Geography Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society-IBG, contributing to abolitionist and transformative justice discourses.