South West branch

BSC South West Region conference – 6 June 2026
Rage Against the ‘Machines’: Feeling and Challenging Systems of Normalisation and Oppression

This conference invites papers that mobilise rage as a critical, affective, and political lens through which to interrogate systems of normalisation and domination. Rage is often dismissed as irrational, dangerous, or unproductive.

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s figure of the feminist killjoy, this conference understands rage not as a failure of civility but as confirming evidence that something is wrong. The killjoy refuses the happiness scripts that sustain systems of domination, exposing how comfort, order, and common sense are secured through the silencing of anger and the normalisation of harm.

Within criminology, killjoy practices disrupt demands for neutrality and compliance, insisting that critical knowledge often emerges from being difficult, angry, and out of place. Rage, in this sense, becomes a method: a way of noticing the violence of machines that work best when they go unnoticed, unquestioned, and unchallenged. By ‘machines’ we refer not only to technological systems, but to the broader assemblages that structure and regulate social life.

These include institutional practices, bureaucratic routines, legal frameworks, conceptual categories, and social norms that produce compliance, marginalisation, and control while often presenting themselves as neutral, necessary, or inevitable.

4 June 2026
University of Plymouth

Part of the BSC SW Region and Culture and Heritage Exchange

For more information please visit https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/2026-annual-plymouth-critical-criminology-conference or contact the organisers Sian Lewis sian.lewis@plymouth.ac.uk or Iain Channing iain.channing@plymouth.ac.uk

South West branch past events

Justice beyond Criminal Justice – 29 October 2025 (in-person)

Hosted by the University of Bath, this one-day symposium brings together academics from across the social sciences to explore the justice processes that sit outside of the formal criminal justice system, used in response to serious harm and injury. We will consider how such processes work in practice, what they might achieve (or not) for those pursuing justice, and their contribution to socio-political processes of accountability and reconciliation. We address these processes against a complex and contested landscape, where varied and distinctive forms of (in)justice occur beyond – and at times are produced by – criminal justice settings, mechanisms, and processes. Evidencing crimes of the powerful is an increasingly vexed process at domestic and international levels. Accountability for state or corporate crime continues to be obscured and trust in conventional reporting has diminished, yet new forms of awareness raising are ascendant, including the proliferation of non- and quasi- judicial mechanisms. Increasingly, more complex forms of victimhood have been acknowledged, especially between human and more-than-worlds, and especially affecting Indigenous communities. The coloniality of criminal justice – and theories of justice – are themselves implicated in these themes, necessitating us to stretch the boundaries of our understanding of justice. In the twenty-first century, in a context where the criminal justice system seems increasingly unable to effectively administer justice – and, at the same time public inquiries, commissions, and alternative dispute resolution have proliferated – there is much to be gained by thinking more openly, and across disciplines, about what it means to pursue and deliver justice ‘by other means’.

This event is a collaboration between the Criminology Research Group at the University of Bath, the SWDTP, and the British Society of Criminology (South West). Our keynote speaker is Professor Richard Moorhead (University of Exeter), who will be sharing with us his research on the Post Office IT Horizon Inquiry. The event also incorporates panels for oral presentations, as well as a parallel poster and art-work exhibition session. There will be an optional training session for attendees to learn more about the ethics and practicalities of using images in and for research, as well as their role in engaging non-academic audiences.

We invite submissions for oral presentations, posters, and art-work that engage with the following themes:

• Responses to state crime
• Restorative justice
• Kaledoscopic justice
• Public inquiries
• Inquests
• Complaint bodies and ombuds
• Parallel justice
• Alternative dispute resolution and mediation
• Zemiological approaches to/theoretisations of justice
• Transitional justice and International Criminal Law
• Alternative/non-traditional spaces for justice
• Southern criminology
• Decolonial approaches and perspectives to crime and harm
• Green criminology, environmental and ecological justice
• Criminological futures, rights, and justice
• Documentary as a form of justice