Research groups
Areas of responsibility
Dr. Victor Lund Shammas is Head of Department and Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Agder, Norway.
His research interests include comparative penology, political economy, critical theory, ethnographic methods, and political theology.
He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Oslo (2017), and has previously worked as Senior Researcher at the Work Research Institute (AFI), Oslo Metropolitan University (2017-2021). He has been a visiting scholar/doctoral student at Stanford University (2017), Stockholm University (2015), and the University of California, Berkeley (2015-2016).
His research has appeared in journals such as Constellations, Punishment & Society, Critical Criminology, Capital & Class, and the British Journal of Criminology, with more than 50,000 article views on Academia.edu and ResearchGate combined and over 600 citations on Google Scholar. His work has been supported by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR), which granted Shammas and a team of four researchers a 7 million NOK ($900,000) grant (2016-2020).
He has reviewed scientific publications and projects for the European Research Council, European Journal of Criminology, Qualitative Sociology, Incarceration, and numerous other journals, with 46 credited peer review contributions, according to Web of Science. In 2022, he spoke with Senator Bernie Sanders, then-Chairman of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, on the topic of outer space policy and consulted directly with the Senator’s policy advisors. He has lectured in the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, on the topic of Marx’s Capital, served as discussant and presented papers at academic conferences such as the American Society of Criminology (New Orleans, 2016), Journal of Youth Studies Conference (Copenhagen, 2015) and British Society of Criminology (Nottingham, 2016), and at the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Theology (2022). Recently, he has lectured before audiences of Belgian criminal justice scholars and practitioners (UCLouvain Université Saint-Louis Brussels, 2023).
Research
Selected publications
Journal Articles
Shammas, V. L. (2023; forthcoming) “The global hinterland of social democracy: On the limitations of Norwegian welfare capitalism.” Nordic Welfare Research/Nordisk välfärdsforskning. [preprint]
Shammas, V. L. (2023) “Parallax theology: Reframing compensation theodicy.” Religions 14(8), 1003; DOI:10.3390/rel14081003 .
Shammas, V. L. and Sandset, T. (2020) “Reproduction and the welfare state: Notes on Norwegian biopolitics.” Nordic Journal of Social Research. DOI:10.7577/njsr.3244.
Shammas, V. L. (2019) “Penal elitism: Anatomy of a professorial category.” Critical Criminology. DOI:10.1007/s10612-019-09463-7.
Shammas, V. L. (2019) “The perils of parole hearings: California lifers, performative disadvantage and the ideology of insight.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 42(1): 142-160.
Shammas, V. L. (2019) “The parrhesia of neo-fascism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 13(3): 1-14.
Shammas, V. L. (2019) “Surplus populations and the state: A criminological view.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 8(1): 131-146.
Shammas, V. L. (2019) “Staging sovereignty: Punitivity, xenophobia, and the frail society.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology 11:39-52.
Shammas, V. L. and Holen, T. B. (2019) “One giant leap for capitalistkind: Private enterprise in outer space.” Palgrave Communications.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “The state as God: On Bourdieu’s political theology.” Journal of Extreme Anthropology 2(2): 61-77.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “The dissolution of social democracy: How law and order came to Norway.” Federal Sentencing Reporter 31(1): 85-89.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “Burying Mont Pèlerin: Milton Friedman and neoliberal vanguardism.” Constellations 25(1): 117-132.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “Bourdieu’s five lessons for criminology.” Law and Critique 29(2): 201-219.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “The pains of sovereignty: On the joyous passion of the self-punishing subject.” Journal of Extreme Anthropology 2(2): 111-117.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “The Arab body.” Rhizomes, no. 34. DOI:10.20415/rhiz/034.e09.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “Superfluity and insecurity: Disciplining surplus populations in the Global North.” Capital & Class 42(3): 411-418.
Shammas, V. L. (2017) “Prisons of labor: Social democracy and a triple transformation of the politics of punishment in Norway, 1900-2014.” In: Ugelvik, T. and Smith, P. S. (eds.) Scandinavian Penal History, Culture and Prison Practice: Embraced By the Welfare State? London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 57-80.
Shammas, V. L. (2016) “Who's afraid of penal populism? Technocracy and ‘the people’ in the sociology of punishment.” Contemporary Justice Review 19(3): 325-346.
Shammas, V. L. (2016) “The rise of a more punitive state: On the attenuation of Norwegian penal exceptionalism in an era of welfare state transformation.” Critical Criminology 24(1): 57-74.
Shammas, V. L. and Sandberg, S. (2016) “Habitus, capital, and conflict: Bringing Bourdieusian field theory to criminology.” Criminology and Criminal Justice 16(2): 195-213.
Shammas, V. L. (2015) “A prison without walls: Alternative incarceration in the late age of social democracy.” Prison Service Journal (January): 3-9.
Shammas, V. L. (2015) “Denying the danger of difference: Notes on the pacification of inmate social relations in an era of ethnoracial diversity.” Prison Service Journal (May): 5-10.
Shammas, V. L., Sandberg, S., and Pedersen, W. (2014) “Trajectories to mid- and higher-level drug crimes: Penal misrepresentations of drug dealers in Norway.” British Journal of Criminology 54(4): 592-612.
Shammas, V. L. (2014) “The pains of freedom: Assessing the ambiguity of Scandinavian penal exceptionalism on Norway’s Prison Island.” Punishment & Society 16(1): 104-123.
Essays and Reviews
Shammas, V. L. (2021) “Book review: Magnus Hörnqvist: The Pleasure of Punishment.” Punishment & Society.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “Rethinking Axel Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism.” Continental Thought & Theory.
Shammas, V. L. and Holen, T. B. (2018) “Leaving the twenty-first century: A conversation with McKenzie Wark.” Continental Thought & Theory.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “The illusion of non-capitalist spaces.” Public Seminar, 14 September 2018.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “Critical remarks on Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism?” Continental Thought & Theory 2(2): 159-163.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “Bourdieu's divine state.” Critical Legal Thinking, 31 July.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “Notes on Guy Standing’s The Corruption of Capitalism.” Continental Thought & Theory 2(1): 372-385.
Shammas, V. L. (2018) “The slow erosion of Scandinavian social democracy.” Comparative Penology (COMPEN) Blog, Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University.
Shammas, V. L. (2017) “Book review: Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore: Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism.” Political Studies Review 15(3): 475-476.
Shammas, V. L. (2017) “Book review: David Garland: The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction.” Theoretical Criminology 21(2): 255-258.
Shammas, V. L. (2017) “Pains of imprisonment.” In: Kerley, K. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Corrections. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Shammas, V. L. (2017) “The Society of Captives (Gresham Sykes).” In: Kerley, K. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Corrections. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Shammas, V. L. (2017) “The Jail (John Irwin).” In: Kerley, K. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Corrections. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Shammas, V. L. (2016) “Book review: Dominique Moran: Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration.” Punishment & Society 19(5): 653-655.
Shammas, V. L. (2016) “Book review: Robert Sussman: The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea.” International Sociology 31(2): 199-203.
Shammas, V.L. (2015) “Book review: Franklin Zimring: The City that Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control.” Acta Sociologica 58(1): 95-96.
Shammas, V. L. (2014) “Book review: Erica Weiss: Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty.” Social Anthropology 22(4): 518-519.