Ioanna Gouseti joined the Department of Sociology at LSE as Course Tutor in 2016, after completing a PhD in Social Research Methods at the Department of Methodology, LSE. Her background is in Sociology (BA) and Criminology (MA). Her research interests lie at the intersection of criminology, research methodology, and sociology. She conducts interdisciplinary research on gender and crime, public attitudes to crime and justice, and experiences of primary and secondary victimisation, focusing on sexual harassment.
In 2020, Ioanna was awarded the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to conduct research on the topic of gendered harassment in public spaces in the UK. This a 3-year research project that looks at lay experiences of and attitudes to the phenomenon, focusing on socio-cultural and contextual factors. Methodologically, the project utilises triangulation of quantitative methodologies, combining survey and experimental data. The project also seeks to investigate the degree of the normalisation of gendered harassment in the understudied context of urban public spaces. Conceptualising harassment as part of a continuum of gendered violence and inequality, the project’s aim is to provide empirical data that will contribute to a ‘zero-tolerance’ culture to gendered harassment in public spaces.
At the moment, Ioanna is also conducting experimental research on the impact of crime information on fear of crime. Crime is an important discursive subject within political, cultural, and societal contexts, encompassing stereotypes, normative assessments, images of criminals and victims. Publicly available crime information can thus determine how people view, experience, and react to the risk of crime. The key question that this research seeks to address is: What is the impact of different types of crime information and its processing on affective, behavioural, and cognitive attitudes to the crime-risk? This project is funded by LSE's Suntory and Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD).
More generally, Ioanna is interested in structural gendered violence, cultural criminology, and alternative modes of justice. She adopts an integrated methodological approach to the empirical exploration of her interests, drawing on survey methodology, experiments, and mixed methods. Her research has been funded by the: Leverhulme Trust, LSE STICERD, A.G. Leventis Foundation, Cabinet Office, LSE Centre for Economic Performance, Bucks New University. She has been involved in academic collaborations with research centres and public institutions, such as the LSE Mannheim Centre for Criminology, the Greek Centre for the Study of Crime, and UNISON.
Along with her research, Ioanna is committed to teaching. In the Department of Sociology, she has been convening criminology and social research methods courses at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She has also taught in the City University, the University of Cape Town, Royal Holloway, and the University of Athens. She's been the recipient of teaching awards and funding, such as the LSE Teaching Excellence Award and the LSE Learning and Teaching Innovation Grant.
You can find out more about her research here. Access her ORCID page here.
Selected Publications
Gouseti, I. (2018). Worry about victimization, crime information processing and social categorization biases. Legal and Criminological Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/lcrp.12130
Gouseti, I. (2018). “A construal-level approach to the fear of crime.” In: Lee, M. & Mythen, G. (eds.). International Handbook of Fear of Crime, Routledge.
Brown, J., Fleming, J., Silvestri, M., Linton, K., Gouseti, I. (2019) Implications of police occupational culture in discriminatory experiences of senior women in police forces in England and Wales. Policing and Society, 29 (2). pp. 121-136.
Brown, J., Gouseti, I., and Fife-Schaw, C. (2017). “Sexual harassment experienced by police staff serving in England, Wales and Scotland: A descriptive exploration of prevalence and antecedents.” The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles.
Gouseti, I. & Jackson, J. (2016). Psychological Distance and the Fear of Crime. In Chadee, D. Psychology of Fear, Crime and the Media. International Perspectives. Routledge.
Jackson, J. & Gouseti, I. (2015). “Threatened by Violence: Affective and Cognitive Reactions to Violent Victimization.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, doi: 10.1177/0886260515584336
Jackson, J., & Gouseti, I. (2015). Psychological proximity and the construal of crime: A commentary on ‘Mapping fear of crime as a context-dependent everyday experience that varies in space and time’. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 20(2), 212-214.