Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology

I am attending and presenting at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, which takes place in the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown from Wednesday, November 15 to Saturday, November 18, 2017. The theme for the meeting is Crime, Legitimacy and Reform: Fifty Years after the President’s Commission.

I am presenting (with Rita Shah, Eastern Michigan University) the paper, Bringing Together Feminist and Visual Criminology to (Re)Imagine Invisible Injuries, on November 15 in Room 403 (4th floor) at 11:00am. This paper builds upon earlier work that brings together approaches from feminist and visual studies to interrogate forms of evidence related to crime. Specifically, we incorporate methods from each to examine an ongoing case study of “invisible injuries” sustained by survivors of family violence. In this case, the most prominent invisible injury that advocates, legal representatives, medical experts, and survivors attempt to see is brain trauma. The case demonstrates how interpretations of visualizations serve as evidence of the injury, victimization, and longstanding effects on survivors’ health and well-being. Such efforts to pursue justice, we argue, illustrate challenges of doing a feminist visual criminology—namely, the tensions of expertise, context, agency, and voice in relation to representation. We conclude with a preliminary discussion of how this case study highlights challenges of pursuing a feminist visual criminology.

In addition to the paper, I am chairing the author-meets-critics session for The Meaning of Rehabilitation and its Impact on Parole: There and Back Again in California by Rita Shah. It takes place in Room 304 (3rd floor), beginning at 8:00am on Friday, November 17.