Annual Criminology Meetings

I am attending both the American Society of Criminology and Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology annual meetings this year.

At the American Society of Criminology meeting, I am looking forward to showcasing the fantastic contributors to our forthcoming co-edited book (with Dr Rita Shah), the Routledge Handbook of Public Criminologies. We have two great, back-to-back sessions planned:

Thursday, November 14th, 11:00am to 1:50pm, Foothill E, 2nd Level

Public Criminologies I: Challenges, Tensions, and Dilemmas and Public Criminologies II: Engagement, Ethics, and Critique

In light of renewed interest in and debates about evidence-based policy, research impact, and wider criminological engagement, it is timely to explore the benefits, practices, and risks of bringing criminological knowledge in dialogue with communities outside the academy. This panel is the first of two sessions that brings together contributors to the Routledge Handbook on Public Criminologies, which is in press. Attentive to the plurality of public criminologies, it captures a variety of activities, including media engagement, public outreach, policy advising, activism, expert testimony, civically-oriented education, and knowledge co-production. Specific topics covered in the first session include the emergence of different public criminologies, dangers of wider outreach, feminist praxis and agendas for the contemporary moment, institutional and structural barriers to mobilizing knowledge, and serendipitous opportunities for public criminology. The second session covers issues related to access to justice, educational outreach, feminist criminological engagement, organizational activism, possibilities of transformative justice, and critiques of public criminology.

Presenters: Michelle Brown (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), Lynn Chancer (Hunter College, CUNY), Meda Chesney-Lind (ASC President, University of Hawai’i-Mānoa), Pete Kraska (Eastern Kentucky University), Anastasia Powell (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Jianhua Xu (University of Macau), Vincenzo Ruggiero (Middlesex University), Renee Shelby (Georgia Institute of Technology), Krystle Shore (University of Waterloo), Emily Troshynski (University of Nevada-Las Vegas)

At the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology meeting, I am participating in a thought-provoking roundtable, which I have co-organized with Fiona Haines:

Thursday, November 14th, 2:15pm to 3:35pm, Meeting Room 9

The Evidence of Harms and the Harms of Evidence: Critical Reflections on Corporate Harm

The harms of commerce are well conceptualized through research into corporate and white-collar crime and more recently green criminology. Less examined in these fields is the nature of evidence and what authority evidence carries when it comes to responding to these harms and crimes. This roundtable examines the complexity of evidence when dealing with the chronic harms of commerce: from environmental damage to catastrophic impacts on health and destruction of indigenous knowledge. This roundtable takes as a starting point the understanding that evidence as ‘fact’ is shaped by the interests of those with power and resources. Yet, it questions the analytical solution that evidence is irredeemably socially constructed in the face of mounting social and environmental damage. Evidence that emerges from research and expertise remain critically important understanding the significance of the harm business generates. Further, evidence can be central to struggles involving legal strategies and interventions that can ameliorate corporate harm. Here, we question key assumptions that accrue from this orientation towards evidence. In particular, this roundtable will interrogate the value of understanding good evidence and expertise as ‘independent’. It will explore the benefit acknowledging the multiple dependencies on evidence, not only as researchers but also as citizens, policymakers and politicians. Learning from different knowledge traditions as well as reflexive examination of western knowledge may generate a way to develop evidence with greater integrity – and greater benefit in terms of charting ways forward.