Love as Human Virtue and Human Need and Its Role in the Lives of Long-term Prisoners: A Multidisciplinary Exploration

Dr Christina Straub's vocation is centred around qualitative social research. She graduated as a Cultural Scientist at the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the European-University-Viadrina, Germany, in 2009 with an ethnographic study about the construction of individual identity in the subculture of Hot Rodding.Her first post-graduation employment led her to work as full-time Research Assistant for the Prisons Research Centre at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Together with Professor Alison Liebling and Helen Arnold she conducted a study from 2009-2011 about staff-prisoner-relationships in a high-security prison commissioned by the UK Home Office. She also completed a qualitative evaluation of RESTORE for London-based charity The Forgiveness Project. As a Senior Research Assistant at Southampton Law School she was involved in an ESRC-funded impact project in collaboration with the Prison Reform Trust, supervised by Dr Harry Annison on the pains and needs of families of people serving an Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection (IPP).