Criminology

All Souls Criminology Seminar Series - Prof. Niki Lacey

The Sexual Politics of Anti-Trafficking Discourse The Sexual Politics of Anti-Trafficking Discourse

Fergus McNeill introduces the main arguments from his recent book explaining the meanings of 'mass supervision’ and outlining its scale and social distribution, the processes by which it has been legitimated and its significance as a penal phenomenon. However, the main focus of this seminar will be on the lived experience of supervision, as revealed in conventional ethnographies and in his own recent work using creative methods to explore and represent what it is and how it feels to be supervised. In conclusion, Fergus will explore how mass supervision might be best resisted and restrained. Fergus McNeill is a Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow.

The peacebuilding literature has long emphasised that youth involvement is key to ensuring long-term peace. In the aftermath of the 'no' victory in the Colombian peace plebiscite, great emphasis has been placed on youth movements' push for peace. However, statistics on violent groups in Latin America show that these groups are largely made of young people. The position of young people at the crux between peacebuilding and perpetuation of violence needs to be contextually unpacked. While studies have tended to focus on youth movements, the question of how non-organised, (self-)marginalised youths relate to peacebuilding is largely unaddressed. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork with outcast adolescents in the conflict-affected town of San Carlos and marginal neighbourhoods in the close-by city Medellín, this paper addresses this gap.

Professor Ben Bowling

Manuel Eisner, University of Cambridge

Professor Sveinung Sandberg

Dr Anna Souhami, Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh School of Law, gives a talk for the Criminology seminar series on 11th October 2018. Drawing on her ethnographic research in Shetland and the Western Isles, she made us question our understanding of 'place' and what it means when applied to criminological research. Dr Souhami began with the idea that there are limitations to our conceptual vocabulary, particularly within research that considers urban policing as the norm. Islands have been used as laboratories to test theories in the natural sciences, and Dr Souhami utilises a similar approach in order to 'explore the blind spots in the way we think' about policing.

Dr. Coretta Philips and Dr. Alpa Parmar London School of Economics and University of Oxford

Dr Henrique Carvalho, University of Warwick

Prof. Ben Bradford, University College London

All Souls Seminar: 1st February 2018. This paper is about problems of representation in criminology, and builds on a recent chapter in the Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology (2017). It begins with the recognition that like other researchers, criminologists are engaged in a process of making things visible. That is, we try to get others to see something for the first time, or to see it in a new light, or to see it the 'right' way, countering fallacies and misrepresentations with good evidence. But criminology is a particularly fraught field because particular, and particularly domineering, imagery is so well established, analysed and embedded that it colonises political and popular imaginations. How can one represent injustice without reinforcing it, given that even critical representations tend to encourage particular associations? The paper focuses mainly on the case of prison, first to deconstruct the problematics of representation and, second, to suggest how these might be challenged and overcome, for example, by making visible aspects of punishment which are presently invisible. The paper draws on Science and Technology Studies (STS) to suggest alternative practices of representation, particularly relying on STS concepts of multiplicity, contradiction and absence. Finally, I connect the project of developing new representational practices to a progressive politics of criminology, hoping to stimulate debate in the seminar about the (appropriate) relationship of the descriptive and the normative in social science research.

All Souls Seminar, Centre for Criminology, Univeristy of Oxford, 18th January 2018. In late summer 2015, Sweden embarked on one of the largest self-described humanitarian efforts in its history, opening its borders to 163,000 asylum seekers fleeing the war in Syria. Six months later this massive effort was over. On January 4, 2016, Sweden closed its border with Denmark. This closure makes a startling reversal of Sweden’s open borders to refugees and contravenes free movement in the Schengen Area, a founding principle of the European Union. What happened? Vanessa Barker’s new book develops the concept of penal nationalism to explain the use of penal power in response to mass mobility for nationalistic purposes, including state sovereignty, national identity and in the Swedish case, welfare state preservation.

Insa Koch, LSE - 19 Jan 2017

Stephen Farrall, University of Sheffield - 02 Feb 2017