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Biography

Prof. Marleen Easton is a social worker and a sociologist. She finished her PhD on ‘The demilitarization of the Belgian Gendarmerie’ in 2000 at the Free University Brussels. 

Marleen Easton is director of the research group ‘Governing and Policing Security’ (GaPS), located at the Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Faculty of Economy and Business Administration at Ghent University. Her research group stands at the crossroads of public administration/governance, management and criminology. A governance and management approach is applied to a whole range of local, national and international problems related to policing and security. Furthermore, GaPS is focusing on (1) the nature of the actors enforcing and controlling security (e.g. public/private, administrative/judicial), (2) blurring boundaries, the shift of competences on the policy and operational level and (3) the implementation of security policies and the perspectives of the security actors involved, their partners and the citizens.

Since 1999 Marleen Easton has been teaching (organizational) sociology, (change) management and security related courses (seminar ‘security policies’ and ‘governance of security’) on the level of third bachelor and master degree in ‘Public Administration’. From 2010 onwards she has been co-organizing an international master on ‘Criminal Justice, Governance and Police Science’ www.macrimgov.eu in cooperation with the Ruhr Universität in Bochum, Germany, where she is visiting professor. 

Marleen Easton’s main research interests are public policing, the governance of security and related management issues. Since 2007 she has supervised several (mostly qualitative) research projects on topics such as community policing, performance management in the police, policing and diversity, policing riots, police discretion, management of information within the public police, police leadership, police education, (monitoring) recidivism, nodal policing in Belgian ports, radicalization, governance of informal economy, crisis management, perceptions of corruption, intersections between military and police roles and between police and social work. Easton has supervised 27 research projects in her career of which 19 in the last 5 years (2008-2013). Every study has been valorized in a conference/seminar in cooperation with policing practitioners, in (an) academic publication(s) and has been integrated into one of the courses she teaches. She supervises/d 31 researchers of which 5 work(ed) towards a PhD or post-doc. She published 28 books, 40 book chapters and 11 refereed articles. She has experience in designing European research projects on radicalization (and violence), environmental security and plural policing. Since March 2013 she has been Associate Investigator at Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (CEPS), Griffith University, Brisbane. 

Marleen Easton is chief editor of the Belgian ‘double blind peer reviewed’ journal ‘Orde van de Dag’ [Order of the Day] which addresses issues related to current debates on crime control and policies. She is an active member of the editorial board of journals and book series such as the book-series ‘Het Groene Gras’ (Eleven International Publishing, the Hague), ‘Cahiers Politiestudies’ [Cahiers Police Studies] (Maklu publisher, Antwerp) and ‘Policing and Society : An International Journal of Research and Policy' (Routledge). Since 2003 she has been an active member of the board of directors of the Flemish Centre for Police Studies (www.politiestudies.be) and since 2004 she has been the coordinator of the working group on ‘Blurring Military-Police Roles’ of the European Research Group on Military and Society (ERGOMAS).