Academic interests
- Globalization and inequality
- Migration control and border policing
- Knowledge production
- Digitalization
- Criminological theory
Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law. Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, she studied law at the University of Ljubljana and obtained in 2003 her PhD degree from the University of Oslo, where she was appointed regular professor in 2009.
Katja’s primary research interests are in globalization, migration and border control, international police co-operation, sociology of knowledge and the uses of advanced information and communication technologies in contemporary criminal justice. She has, together with David R. Goyes, recently completed a monograph entitled Victimhood, Memory, and Consumerism: Profiting from Pablo (Oxford University Press) on the impact of global entertainment industry on collective memory of violence in Medellin.
Katja is currently working on a project about digitalization and private economies of knowledge in criminal justice (CRIMKNOW). She has participated in NORDHOST: Nordic Hospitalities in a Context of Migration and Refugee Crisis and has headed a research project about the intersections of migration control and penal power, entitled Crime Control in the Borderlands of Europe, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Together with Helene O.I. Gundhus, she conducted research on the European agency for the management of external borders Frontex.
Teaching
Katja is currently the Head of Teaching and Learning at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law.
She is also responsible for the following courses:
- KRIM 4102
- KRIM 2952/4952
- KRIM 4104
- RSOS 4104
Awards
Katja has been awarded the 2023 The Thorsten Sellin & Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck Award by the American Society of Criminology. She has received, together with Professor Helene Gundhus, the British Journal of Criminology Radzinowicz Prize 2015 for the article Policing Humanitarian Borderlands: Frontex, Human Rights and the Precariousness of Life. Her book Sentencing in the Age of Information: From Faust to Macintosh was in 2006 joint winner of the Socio-Legal Studies Association Hart Book Prize.
Editorships and Board memberships
Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
- Chair of the Advisory Board of HEUNI
- Co-founder and co-editor of Routledge Studies in Criminal Justice, Borders and Citizenship
- Associate Editor of Theoretical Criminology and Crime Media Culture
- Member of Border Criminologies
- President of Triglav – the Slovene association in Norway