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