In 1995 an annual collection of papers was made available online for the first time in what became ‘Papers from the British Criminology Conference, Volume 1’ (sometimes identified as ‘The British Criminology Conference: Selected Proceedings’). This online journal continued for a further six volumes appearing on-and-off between 1997 and 2004. The journal was re-launched for the 2008 Conference hosted by the Applied Criminology Centre, University of Huddersfield. The result is the collection presented here. We had a very good response from those who presented at the conference and thirteen papers were accepted for publication. All were peer-reviewed by two academics. The papers cover a wide range of subjects and approaches, including criminalisation, deviance, violence, burglary risk, rehabilitation, public protection, public attitudes and trust, fashion, hypercrime, computer games and design.

The papers are labelled as either ‘Panel Papers’ or ‘Postgraduate Papers’. This distinction is made solely because we were keen to encourage PhD students, with postgraduate BSC members submitting a paper also eligible for the BSC ‘Postgraduate Paper Prize’. Congratulations to Marian Duggan of Queen’s University Belfast who is the winner of the 2008 Postgraduate Paper Prize, for her paper “Theorising homophobic violence in Northern Ireland”.

Each paper can be accessed by clicking on the relevant link below or, if you prefer, the whole journal can be downloaded as a single document.

Andrew Millie (Loughborough University)

Papers from the British Criminology Conference, Vol. 8. 2008
whole volume

Front pages

Editorial
Andrew Millie

From hyperspace to hypercrime: Technologies and the new geometries of deviance and control.
Michael McGuire

Playing around with crime and criminology in videogames: Exploring common themes in games studies and criminology
Nic Groombridge

Theorising homophobic violence in Northern Ireland
Marian Duggan

Race riots on the beach: A case for criminalising hate speech?
Nicole Asquith

Public reactions to the case of Mary Wilson, the last woman to be sentenced to death in England and Wales
Lizzie Seal

The Sex Offender Register: A measure of public protection or a punishment in its own right?
Terry Thomas

The elasticity of rehabilitation
Gavin D. Duffy