Registered Address: British Society of Criminology, 2-6 Cannon Street, London, EC4M 6YH
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National BSC Events
11th - 14th July 2010
The British Society of Criminology Annual Conference 2010 will be hosted by the Department of Criminology at the University of Leicester. The conference will take place from Sunday 11th July to Wednesday 14th July and will be held in the leafy surroundings of the University of Leicester's award-winning conference centre.
The Department of Criminology University of Leicester
154 Upper New Walk
Leicester
LE1 7QA
Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Dilemmas and Diversity in Criminology
The theme has been chosen to reflect the fact that criminology remains in a period of expansion and transition, embracing an impressive range of theoretical and empirical perspectives. Human rights has in the last three to five years emerged as one of the most pressing and stimulating areas of criminological study.
However, ‘human rights’ is also intended to be suggestive of the broader concern that most of us in academic criminology have about issues as wide-ranging as the rights of all citizens to live in safety and to feel that an appropriate balance has been struck between security and privacy, the rights of victims to see justice done, the rights of prisoners to live in humane conditions, the rights of ex-offenders to resettle in society after serving their sentence, and so on.
‘Human wrongs’ similarly can be interpreted broadly as the focus of virtually all areas of criminological scholarship. The reference to ‘dilemmas’ provides a link with the previous BSC Conference (Cardiff 2009) which aims to explore some of the challenges facing criminology in this ongoing period of questioning and change and prompt participants to think about the knowledge they produce through their work. Finally, in addition to encouraging participation from a diversity of scholars and practitioners, the theme also underlines the cultural diversity and vibrancy of the host city, Leicester.
The conference theme gives primacy to the increasingly important relationship between criminology and human rights, but has been framed in deliberately inclusive terms as a way of capturing the imagination of all criminologists.
Keynote speakers
Clive Stafford Smith
Renowned human rights lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith OBE, is the founder and Director of Reprieve, a legal charity which focuses on death penalty cases and reuniting those accused of terrorism with their legal rights. The people that Clive represents are those for whom human rights are most likely to be jettisoned or eroded and whose cases involve the world’s most powerful governments.
After graduating from Columbia Law School in New York, Clive spent nine years as a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights working on death penalty cases and other civil rights issues. In 1993, Clive moved to New Orleans and launched the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, a non-profit law office specialising in representing poor people in death penalty cases.
Laurie Taylor
Professor Laurie Taylor is a highly acclaimed academic, writer and broadcaster. A graduate of the University of Leicester Department of Sociology, his career has encompassed an impressive range of jobs, including professional actor, salesman, school teacher, librarian and motivational speaker. In the 1960s, Laurie was part of the group of radical criminologists who founded the National Deviancy Conference. His books include Escape Attempts and Psychological Survival (both co-authored with Stan Cohen). For the last 30 years he has been contributing a satirical weekly column to The Times Higher and he currently presents Radio 4’s weekly programme devoted to social science research, ‘Thinking Allowed’. Described by The Independent as ‘suavely mischievous’, Laurie is an accomplished and entertaining speaker.
Jeff Ferrell
Jeff Ferrell earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently Professor of Sociology at Texas Christian University and Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of Crimes of Style (Garland, 1993; Northeastern University Press, 1996), Tearing Down the Streets (Palgrave/Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2001/2002), Empire of Scrounge (New York University Press, 2006), and, with Keith Hayward and Jock Young, Cultural Criminology: An Invitation (SAGE, London, 2008). He is also the co-editor of the books Cultural Criminology (Northeastern University Press, 1995), Ethnography at the Edge (Northeastern University Press, 1998), Making Trouble (Aldine de Gruyter, 1999), and Cultural Criminology Unleashed (Routledge/ Cavendish/Glasshouse, 2004). Jeff Ferrell is the founding and current editor of the New York University Press book series Alternative Criminology, and one of the founding and current editors of the journal Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal (SAGE, London), winner of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ 2006 Charlesworth Award for Best New Journal. In 1998 he received the Critical Criminologist of the Year Award from the Division of Critical Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.
Ben Bowling
Ben Bowling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at King’s College London School of Law. He has held posts in the Home Office Research Unit, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York), University of Cambridge and the University of the West Indies.
He gave evidence to the Lawrence Inquiry and has been an adviser to the United Nations, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, House of Commons, Interpol, Liberty and the Equality and Human Rights Commission). His books include Violent Racism and Racism, Crime and Justice and he is currently working on two new books Policing the Caribbean and Global Policing.
Lilie Chouliaraki
Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at London School of Economics (LSE) and Research Director of POLIS, LSE's public forum on journalism and society. She is interested in the moral implications of the media in contemporary public life, particularly on the link between mediation, social action and cosmopolitan citizenship. She has published extensively on the visibility of suffering in trans-national news, on war and conflict reporting as well as on humanitarian communication, including the use of appeals, films and celebrities at the service of human rights causes. Relevant publications include Discourse in Late Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), The Spectatorship of Suffering (Sage, 2006), The Soft Power of War (ed, Benjamins, 2007) and the forthcoming The Humanitarian Imaginary (Polity, 2010).
Reece Walters
Reece Walters is Professor of Criminology at The Open University. He has published widely on the politics and governance of criminological knowledge, including Deviant Knowledge - Criminology, Politics and Policy and Critical Thinking About The Uses of Research (with Tim Hope). He is an advocate of knowledges of resistance; critical scholarship that embraces the lived realities of those who experience social injustice. His research focusses on crimes of the powerful, notably the ways in which corporate and government officials abuse their authority for personal or political gain. His more recent work including Crime is in the Air - air pollution regulations in the UK, and Eco Crime and GM Food, seek to push existing criminological horizons to include notions of environmental harm and justice. In doing so, his research examines the political economy of water, air and food and how these essential ingredients for human and non-human life are constantly threatened and exploited by the harmful acts of governments and corporations.
