School of Geography and the Environment

Prof. Judith Pallot came to Oxford from a lectureship in Leeds University in 1979 and has been responsible for developing teaching and research in Soviet and Russian geography since then. She is active in the University promoting interdisciplinary links in Russian and East European Studies. Prof. Pallot offers a final year option in the geography honours course on the geography of Russian and East Central Europe and she lectures in the first year course on the political geography of the Cold War. Prof. Pallot supervises graduates working on Russia on topics ranging from environmental issues and rural society to contemporary urban change. Many have gone on to university posts in the UK and elsewhere. She is an active member of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and was its Treasurer and committee member in the 1990s.

Prof. Pallot first visited the USSR as a post-graduate exchange student in 1979 and has been a frequent visitor ever since. In the late 1980s she spearheaded exchange agreements with geographers in Russia bringing many geographers who had never before left the USSR to Oxford under a British Council funded scheme. She has especially strong links with researchers in the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences and has had a ten year collaboration with Tatyana Nefedova, Russia's leading authority on Russian agriculture. She also collaborates with scholars in the Geography Departments of Moscow and Perm' State University, and the Peasant Studies Centre of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. In the past two years she has developed links with the Federal Penal Service in the Russian Federation Ministry of Justice negotiating a memorandum of understanding between Oxford University and the Academy of Law and Penal Management in Ryazan' which has led on to a collaborative research project.

Prof. Pallot is on the editorial board of Eurasian Geography and Economics.

Russia's penal geography

Prof. Pallot's current research interest lies in Russia's penal geography. She is the principal investigator for an ESRC funded project 'Space and Gender in Russia's Geography of Punishment'. The project, which due to the sensitivities of working with the Russian penal bureaucracy was in gestation for two years, formally began in November 2006. Her co-researchers are Dr Laura Piacentini a criminologist from the University of Strathclyde, and the geographer and former postgraduate of the School of Geography and the Environment, Dr Dominique Moran, from the University of Birmingham. The project involves collaboration with a newly constituted research group within the Academy of Law and Penal Management in Ryazan'. Seed money for this project was obtained from the University of Oxford Research Development Fund (£20,000) which paid for a pilot study in L'govo juvenile girls colony in March 2006. This was followed in April 2007 by field work in three women's penal colonies in the republic of Mordovia. In December further fieldwork is scheduled in penal colonies in Perm' krai. Prof. Pallot has already presented early findings from these studies at the University of Toronto (Conference 'What it Soviet Now?' in 2006) and the RGS/IBG September 2007. In conjunction with the research on women's experiences of the Russian penal system, Prof. Pallot has applied for funding (Nuffield and Guggenheim) to employ Dr Elena Katz to work with her on extending the research of women's experiences of penal Russia to include prison visitors.

The geography of the Russian peasantry

Prof. Pallot has an established reputation in the field of Russian 'peasant studies'. Her early work focused on the responses of the Russian peasantry to the reform initiatives of the late Imperial government (particularly, the Stolypin Land Reform) and the struggle for common property rights in the Soviet period. In the 1990s she extended this interest to post-Soviet period, to examine rural adaptations and household food production during the transformation to a market economy. The Leverhulme funded project with Tatyana Nefedova involved field work in seven regions and more than thirty rural districts located in contrasting regions (including Moscow, Perm', Archangel, Ryazan', Samara and Saratov oblasts and Stavropol' krai). The results of this research have been published in a variety of English and Russian language journals and in two books. Research is on going with research trips planned for Kostroma and Mordovia in 2007 and 2008.

In August 2007 Prof. Pallot was involved in a film project for the Russian TV station Kul'tura on the history of Russian farming in a global context. The results will be broadcast as a 14 part series in November and December 2007.

Selected Research Projects

• Ethnic Identity Construction among Muslim Prisoners in the USSR and Russia.
  In collaboration with Dr Elena Katz; Financial support from Leverhulme; (2018-2020)
• Penality and the Social Construction of Gender in Post-Soviet Russia: the impact on prisioners' relatives of their encounters with penal Russia
  In collaboration with Dr Elena Katz; Financial support from AHRC; (2010-2012)
• Women in the Russian Penal System: The role of distance in the theory and practice of imprisonment in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia
  In collaboration with Dr Laura Piacentini (University of Strathclyde) and Dr Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham); Financial support from ESRC; (2006-2009)

Recent Graduate Research Students (since 2006)

Books

• Pallot, J. and Katz, E. (2017) Waiting at the Prison Gate: Women, Identity and the Russian Prison System. I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-78453-660-2.
• Emel'chenko, E. and Pallot, J. (eds.) (2015) Okolo Tyurmy. zhenskie seti podderzhki zaklyuchennykh (Close-by Prison. Women's networks to support prisoners). Alteya.
• Pallot, J. and Piacentini, L. (2012) Gender, Geography and Punishment: The experience of women in carceral Russia. Oxford University Press, Oxford. pp. 330. ISBN: 978-0-19-965861-9.
• Pallot, J. and Nefedova, T. (2007) Russia's Unknown Agriculture: Household Production in Post-Soviet Russia. Oxford University Press, Oxford. pp. 272. ISBN: 0199227411.
• Pallot, J. and Nefedova, T. (2006) Neizvestnaya rossiya. Bez korovy nel'zya. (You can't Live Without a Cow). Novoe Izdatel'stvo, Moscow.
• Pallot, J. (1999) Land Reform in Russia, 1906-1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin's Project of Rural Transformation. Oxford University Press.
• Pallot, J. (1998) Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the peasantry, 1861-1930. Macmillan.
• Pallot, J. and Shaw, D.J.B. (1990) Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia. Oxford University Press.
• Pallot, J. (1981) Planning in the Soviet Union. Croom Helm, London.

Journal Articles

• Makhrova, A.G., Nefedova, T.G. and Pallot, J. (2016) The specifics and spatial structure of circular migration in Russia. Eurasian Geography And Economics, 57(6): 802-818.
• Pallot, J. (2015) The gulag as the crucible of Russia's 21st-century system of punishment. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 16(3): 619-648.
• Pallot, J. (2015) The topography of incarceration: the spatial continuity of penality and the legacy of the gulag in twentieth- and twenty-first century Russia. Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research, 7(1): 26-50.
• Katz, E. and Pallot, J. (2014) Prisoners' Wives in Post-Soviet Russia: 'For my Husband I am Pining!'. Europe-Asia Studies, 66(2): 204-224.
• Pallot, J. and Katz, E. (2014) The Management of Prisoners' Children in the Russian Federation. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 53(3): 237-254.
• Piacentini, L. and Pallot, J. (2014) 'In Exile Imprisonment' in Russia. British Journal of Criminology, 54(1): 20-37.
• Moran, D., Pallot, J. and Piacentini, L. (2012) Rikoksen ja rangaistuksen maantiede Venäjän (Geography of Crime and Punishment in Russia). Idäntutkimus: The Finnish Review of East European Studies, 2012, 1: 3-24.
• Moran, D., Piacentini, L. and Pallot, J. (2012) Disciplined mobility and carceral geography: prisoner transport in Russia. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(3): 446-460.
• Pallot, J. (2012) Changing symbolic and geographical boundaries between penal zones and rural communities in the Russian Federation. Journal of Rural Studies, 28(2): 118-129.
• Moran, D., Pallot, J. and Piacentini, L. (2011) The geography of crime and punishment in the Russian federation. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 52(1): 79-104.
• Katz, E. and Pallot, J. (2010) From femme normale to femme criminelle in Russia: against the past or towards the future? New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 44: 111-139.
• Nefedova, T.G., Treyvish, A. and Pallot, J. (2010) The "crisis" geography of contemporary Russia. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 51(2): 203-217.
• Pallot, J., Piacentini, L. and Moran, D. (2010) Patriotic discourses in Russia's penal peripheries: remembering the Mordovan gulag. Europe-Asia Studies, 62(1): 1-33.
• Moran, D., Pallot, J. and Piacentini, L. (2009) Lipstick, Lace and Longing: Constructions of femininity inside a Russian prison. Environment and Planning, D, 27(4): 700-720.
• Piacentini, L., Pallot, J. and Moran, D. (2009) Welcome to Malaya Rodina ('Little Homeland'): gender and penal order in a Russian penal colony. Social and Legal Studies, 18(4): 523-542.
• Pallot, J. (2007) 'Gde muzh, tam zhena' (where the husband is, so is the wife): Space and gender in post-Soviet patterns of penality. Environment and Planning A, 39(3): 570-589.
• Pallot, J. (2005) Russia's penal peripheries; Space, Place and Penalty in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30: 98-112.
• Pallot, J. (2004) Razrushila li obshchiny Stolypinskaya reforma? (Did the Stolypin land reform destroy the peasant commune?). Otechestvennye zapiski, 1(16).
• Pallot, J. and Nefedova, T. (2003) Geographical Differentiation in Household plot production in Rural Russia. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 44(1).
• Pallot, J. and Nefedova, T. (2003) Trajectories in people's farming in Moscow oblast during the post-socialist transformation. Journal of Rural Studies, 19(3): 345-362.
• Pallot, J. (2002) Forced Labour for Forestry: the Twentieth century History of Colonization and Settlement in the North of Perm' Oblast'. Europe-Asia Studies, 54(7): 1055-1083.
• Pallot, J. and Nefedova, T. (2002) Individual'nie khozyaistva naseleniya kak obekt geograficheskogo izucheniya' (The Geography of People's Farming), Izvestiya AN. Seirya Geograficheskaya (The Russian Academy of Sciences, Geography Series), 3: 49-61.
• Pallot, J. (2001) The Stolypin land Reforms as Administrative Utopia: Images of Peasantry in Nineteenth Century Russia.: 113-133.

Book Chapters

• Katz, E. and Pallot, J. (2017) 'As the Thread Follows the Needle': The Social Construction of the Prisoner's Wife in Russia from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century. Chapter 25 in, Ilic, M. (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 381-396. ISBN: 978-1-137-54905-1.
• Moran, D., Piacentini, L. and Pallot, J. (2013) Liminal transcarceral space: prisoner transportation for women in the Russian Federation. Chapter 8 in, Moran, D., Gill, N. and Conlon, D. (eds.) Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention. Ashgate. pp. 109-126. ISBN: 9781409442684.
• Nefedova, T. and Pallot, J. (2013) The multiplicity of second home development in the Russian Federation: a case of 'seasonal suburbanization'? Chapter 5 in, Roca, Z. (ed.) Second Home Tourism in Europe: Lifestyle Issues and Policy Responses. Ashgate. pp. 91-120. ISBN: 9781409450719.
• Pallot, J. (2012) Sotsializm v ondom barake (Socialism in one barracks). Chapter 2 in, L. Omel'chenko (ed.) Do i Posle Tyurmy (Before and After Prison). St. P. Aleteia.
• Pallot, J. (2008) Continuities in penal Russia: Space and gender in post-Soviet geography of punishment. In, Luhausen, T. and P. Solomon (eds.) What is Soviet Now? Identities, Legacies, Memories. Lit Verlag. pp. 234-256.
• Pallot, J. (2004) Konstriurovanie ratsional'nogo landshafta v pozheimperiatorskoi rossii. (Imagining the Russian Landscape in late Imperial Russia). In, RUSSKII SBORNIK. Issledovaniya po istorii rossii XIX-XX vv. Volume 1. Moscow 2004. pp. 59-77.
• Pallot, J., Unwin, T. and Johnson, S. (2004) Rural Change and Agriculture. In, Johnson. (2004) Rural Change and Agriculture. In, M. Bradshaw and A. Stenning (eds.) East Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The Post-Socialist States. Developing Areas Research Group of the RGS. Pearson and Prentice Hall. pp. 109-136.
• Pallot, J. (2002) 'Zhizn' v Sovetskoi Derevne' (Life in the Soviet Countryside). In, In, Yul'yam K. Brumfild; Bler Rublya. (ed.) Zhilishche v Rossii: vek XX. Arkhitektura i sotsial'naya istoriya. Moscow, Tri Kvadrata.

Live Broadcasts

• BBC World Service: J. Pallot took part in a discussion on the transportation of Pussy Rioter Nadezhda Tolokonnkova to Siberia. BBC Russian. 6 November 2013.
• BBC Radio 4:. J. Pallot took part in a discussion on the conditions in Penal Colony 14 where convicted Pussy Riot protestor, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, is on hunger strike. Woman's Hour. 25 September 2013.
• CBC, Canada: J. Pallot details the likely life for two members of the band in Part Three: Pussy Riot Jails. [starts at 14.40 mins]. October 2012.
• BBC World Service: J. Pallot took part in a discussion on Russian Penal Colonies, BBC World Service - Newshour, Sunday 14th Oct 2012. [Last 10 mins]
• BBC World Service: J. Pallot took part in a discussion on On womens' prison in Russia - From our Own Correspondent, BBC World Service, Wednesday 11th May 2011.
• CBC, Canada: J. Pallot took part in a live discussion of Russian women's imprisonment on a breakfast current affairs programme The Current in which she described the ESRC project. November 2006.
• BBC Radio 4: J. Pallot took part in an item on women's imprisonment in Russia. Women's Hour. 7 November 2007.
• BBC Radio 3: The Essay The Lives Of Others Ep 5/5, 11.00-11.15pm, 17 - 21 November 2007.