Dr Chloe Peacock

Chloe's research investigates the political, cultural and ideological processes that underpin criminal justice policy and practice, and the structural inequalities of race, class and gender that it is imbricated with. Chloe is particularly interested in the role of ignorance, amnesia, denial and obfuscation in normalising and legitimising state harms, with a focus on the UK.

Chloe joined the School of Law in 2022. Before coming to Sheffield Chloe worked at the University of Bristol, where she held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies where she worked closely with the Secrecy, Power and Ignorance Research Network. Chloe previously worked as a Research Associate at the University of Manchester, and has been a visiting researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, and at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Chloe completed her PhD in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, where she also taught criminology, sociology and research methods, and is currently working on a book, based on her PhD research. The book examines the extraordinarily severe criminal justice response to the widespread disturbances in England in August 2011. It explores how political rhetoric, media representations, and policy discourses worked together to produce a set of important but deeply distorted narratives about the ‘riots’, the ‘rioters’, public opinion, and punishment.

With colleagues at the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity, Chloe has also conducted research on anti-racist activism around monuments and statues. She is especially interested in cultural constructions of activism, and how they are mobilised to normalise the criminalisation of protest.