Skip to main content

Dr Becka S Hudson

Positions held:
  • Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Historical Studies
Email
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Becka Hudson is a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck’s School of Historical Studies. Becka's work draws on history, anthropology and criminology to look at the interaction between psychiatry and imprisonment. Becka brings ethnography and archival work together to situate social practices in political-economic and global context. 

    As part of the UKRI-funded project Cognitive Behavioural Therapies in Britain: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, led by Dr Sarah Marks, Becka leads the project’s criminal justice stream - investigating the development and use of cognitive behavioural therapies (CBT) for ‘offender behaviour change’. 

    Becka is also working on a project, funded via Birkbeck's Research Innovation Award, which uses archives to uncover how different ideas from psychiatry were used in the suppression of uprisings across the British Empire.

    Becka is a former Associate Editor of Law and Critique, former Associate Lecturer in Criminology and is a founding member of Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health. 

    Her PhD, completed at Birkbeck’s Criminology department, investigated the diagnosis and management of ‘personality disordered offenders' in prison and at parole. Her thesis related to work across disciplines about the construction of diagnosis, the political management of trauma, and the nature of imprisonment under contemporary capitalism. 

    Prior to working at Birkbeck, Becka worked with grassroots campaigning organisations on issues of housing, cultural expression, imprisonment and policing. She continues to be involved in campaigning. She has regularly appeared in broadcast media to discuss current issues in criminal justice and has guest lectured about her research internationally. 

  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • Imprisonment
    • Critical psychiatry
    • British colonial psychiatry
    • Political economy of punishment / Marxist understandings of 'carcerality'
    • Ethnography and action research
    • Anthropology of trauma

    Research Centres and Institutes

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • Exploring the Past (SSHC407S5)