MUSSI Fellow Dr. Anna Matczak joins us May 2nd

Thursday, April 21, 2022 - 14:30

MUSSI together with together with Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology welcome Dr. Anna Matczak  of Hague University of Applied Sciences for her fellowship stay in May 2022

From 2-6 May 2022, Dr. Anna Matczak (Lecturer in Comparative Criminology, Safety and Security Management Studies, Researcher, Centre of Expertise on Global Governance, Hague University of Applied Sciences) will visit Maynooth University. Funded by the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI) Visiting Fellowship programme, Anna will be hosted in her visit by Dr. Ian Marder (Assistant Professor in Criminology, Maynooth School of Law and Criminology, MUSSI). Anna and Ian are long-time colleagues, both as members of the European Forum for Restorative Justice and as Core Members for Poland and Ireland, respectively, of Restorative Justice: Strategies for Change, a ten-country project seeking to implement Council of Europe Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)8 concerning restorative justice in criminal matters.

The aim of Anna’s stay is to explore the development of restorative probation services in Poland, Ireland and other countries. This will involve meetings with probation institutions across the island, including a meeting with senior and frontline professionals and restorative justice specialists from the Probation Service in Dublin, and a trip to the North for a similar meeting with officials from the Probation Board of Northern Ireland. Anna and Ian will also meet with restorative justice providers from the community sector in Dublin. The goal is that these meetings will contribute towards a tool or workshop for Polish probation offices on the integration of restorative principles and practices into their day-to-day work. Anna and Ian are also planning to co-deliver a workshop on this topic with Estonian colleagues at a meeting in Tallinn later in May 2022.

They will further engage in activities relating to other interests of theirs, namely public attitudes to restorative justice and restorative justice education. This will involve teaching restorative justice in Coolock Public Library as part of the Maynooth University Department of Adult and Community Education’s Communiversity Programme. They will also co-teach a class on restorative justice as part of LW687 Restorative Justice, a module on the MA in Comparative Criminology and Criminal Justice. Finally, they will have a meeting with a graduate student conducting research in the area of Irish public attitudes to restorative justice. Given Anna’s interest in restorative cities, and Ian’s work in police-community relations, they will also attend a day-long event in Dublin that is being co-organised by community-sector bodies and An Garda Síochána and that aims to build relationships between police and community members.

Dr. Anna Matczak holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology, LSE. Her doctoral research discusses how lay people in Poland understand punishment and justice and how these understandings can shed light on the viability of restorative justice in the Polish context. In 2019, she participated in an expert group meeting to revise the second edition of the UNODC Handbook of Restorative Justice Programmes. Since November 2019, she has been a member, and since November 2021, the Chair of the Research Committee, of the European Forum for Restorative Justice. Since 2020, she has served as a restorative justice mentor to the Wrocław Restorative Justice Board to assist the Wrocław Municipality to join the network of restorative cities. In collaboration with the Nepal Peacebuilding Initiative, she co-organised the 2020 Summer School on Transitional Justice and along with the University of Padua, Italy, was one of the organisers of the 2022 Winter School on Transforming 21st Century Conflicts. At her home institution, she is the course coordinator and the lead lecturer for the module ‘Crime, Safety & Security’. In 2021, she joined the THUAS Centre of Expertise on Global Governance where she is looking into the concept of plural policing during health emergencies and natural disasters.

Selected publications:
Matczak, A. and Rekosz-Cebula, E. (2022). The meaning of gender in sentencing domestic violence homicide cases in Poland, in: Masson, I. and Booth, N. (eds.) Handbook of Women’s Experiences of Criminal Justice. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis.
Matczak, A. (2021). What is a restorative city? Archives of Criminology, 43(2), 399-427.
Matczak, A. (2021). The penal realities of community sentence and the role of probation – the case of the Wrocław model of community service. European Journal of Probation, 13(1), 72-88.
Baylis, M. & Matczak, A. (2019). Tracking the evolution of police training and education in Poland: Linear developments and exciting prospects? Police Practice and Research: An International Journal, 20(3), 273-287.
Matczak, A. (2018). Is restorative justice possible through the eyes of lay people? A Polish evidence-based case study, in: Gavrielides, T. (ed.). Routledge International Handbook of Restorative Justice, London: Routledge.