Straus Fellow
Academic Year 2010-2011
Lynne Haney
Lynne Haney is Professor of Sociology at New York University. She has conducted research on the welfare and penal systems in both the United States and in Eastern Europe and employed diverse research methods in her work, combining ethnography, historiography, and comparative analysis. Haney is the author of Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire (California 2009) and Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (California 2002). She is co-author of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (California 2000) and co-editor of Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context (Routlege 2003). She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants and was appointed as a Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2004. Among other honors, Haney received the American Sociological Association’s 2002 Distinguished Contribution to Sex and Gender, the 2003 Best Book Award in Sex and Gender, and the 2004 Best Book Award in Political Sociology.
Research Project
The Politics of Punishment in Postsocialist Eastern Europe
While at the Straus Institute, I will work on my next book project, provisionally titled Prisons of the Past: The Transnational Politics of Punishment in the East and West. The book examines global patterns in the meaning and practices of punishment through an analysis of penal politics in the United States and Eastern Europe. Based on ethnographic research in U.S. and Hungarian penal institutions, the project investigates the extent to which strategies of penal governance have begun to converge across national borders—thus constituting a form of “neoliberal penality” that now acts as a transnational force of reform.
More specifically, Prisons of the Past chronicles how ideas about crime and punishment moved from West to East and how everything from prison policy to political rhetoric to media accounts in Hungary seem to replicate models inherited from the West. Yet the book also documents how, as those models reached the post-socialist penal system, they were met with skepticism and resistance at the institutional level—and gave rise to a complicated re-imagining of the state socialist past. In this way, the project explores how the increasingly transnational politics of punishment prompted a retreat to the past, leading prison officials, staff, and inmates to resurrect state socialist ideals as they regulated and resisted each other.
