Professor Fergus McNeill
Small Group Project 2022-23
Generative Justice: Exploring how communities re/create solidarity after crime and punishment
With Beth Weaver & Mary Corcoran
This project draws on the extensive experience and skills of the Co-Investigators and their networks (academic and activist) to explore the concept of 'Generative Justice' and to devise an approach to studying and developing it together.
More informationResearch outcomes
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McNeill, F., Corcoran, M., & Weaver, B. (Eds.). (2026).
Generative Justice. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press.
Areas of interest
Cohort
Biography
Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow. Prior to becoming an academic in 1998, Fergus worked for a decade in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker.
Fergus's research projects and publications have focused mainly on institutions, cultures and practices of punishment, rehabilitation and reintegration. As well exploring how increasingly knowledge about desistance from crime might re-shape rehabilitation and reintegration (both within and beyond criminal justice), Fergus’s work has increasingly used creative and ethnographic methods to better understand how criminal justice is experienced, both by those subject to it and by those whose job is to try to realise it in practice.
Fergus’s book, ‘Pervasive Punishment: Making sense of mass supervision’, was the winner of the European Society of Criminology’s book prize in 2021.
Fergus's research projects and publications have focused mainly on institutions, cultures and practices of punishment, rehabilitation and reintegration. As well exploring how increasingly knowledge about desistance from crime might re-shape rehabilitation and reintegration (both within and beyond criminal justice), Fergus’s work has increasingly used creative and ethnographic methods to better understand how criminal justice is experienced, both by those subject to it and by those whose job is to try to realise it in practice.
Fergus’s book, ‘Pervasive Punishment: Making sense of mass supervision’, was the winner of the European Society of Criminology’s book prize in 2021.
Biographical details correct as of 21.04.26