Louise Frey is a PhD candidate, assistant, and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern. She holds a Master's degree in Social Anthropology and Sociology from the University of Bern, including an exchange stay at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Her areas of research include the anthropology of the state and legal anthropology. Her research focuses on matters of criminal law, punishment and imprisonment, and on the discourses and politics that shape these issues. In her dissertation on «Cultivating (the lack) of alternatives to prison?» she empirically explores how alternatives to prison are being negotiated and established in German-speaking Switzerland.
Louise Frey is also a research assistant in the Prison Research Group at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Bern. She is involved in interdisciplinary research projects on the prison system, including research on attitudes and practices of prison staff as well as on the social climate and developments in the carceral system (https://prisonresearch.ch/).
Her Master's thesis applied an ethnographic lens to the professional activities of prison directors in Switzerland, examining their fields of action and their use of discretion. For her Master's degree with Summa cum Laude she was awarded the Faculty Prize of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Bern.
