26 March 2025, 1-2pm. Online. Register here.
Title: Constructionist Green Criminology for a Climate in Crisis
Dr James Heydon and Caitlin Bunce, University of Nottingham
Join us online for a discussion which offers a critical analysis of green criminology, constructionist thought and the climate crisis.
Informed by its radical origins, much of Green Criminology relies on ‘harm’ instead of ‘crime’ when identifying its targets for analysis. Drawing from well-rehearsed arguments rooted in more traditional critical criminology, this approach recognises that many of the most environmentally destructive activities are actually legal. However, despite these origins, attempts to define environmental harm as an objective, apolitical truth to neutrally direct inquiry has allowed for unacknowledged and unquestioned assumptions to enter the field. We argue these assumptions have rendered green criminology’s use of harm as highly acritical, and restricted its analytical potential to explain and tackle pressing environmental problems. In this paper, we draw out this critique before calling on the social constructionist literatures of deviance and social problems to establish a research agenda for constructionist green criminology. Using the environmental issues of urban air quality and waterway pollution, we detail several ways in which constructionist thought can equip green criminology with the tools needed to expand the discipline’s analytical potential and more effectively respond to the climate crisis.