Research

The study of criminology and criminal justice has a long and impressive history at the University of Kent.  In recent years, this tradition has taken a new turn in the development of Kent as an international centre of excellence for research in cultural criminology. 

Cultural criminology is a theoretical, methodological and interventionist approach to the study of crime and deviance that places criminality and its control in the context of culture; that is, it views crime and the agencies and institutions of crime control as cultural products - as creative constructs.  As such they must be read in terms of the meanings they carry.

Members of the crime, control and culture research cluster at the University of Kent are primarily involved in projects and research centred activities connected with cultural criminology, for example in the areas of: subcultures, drug-use and intoxification, the night time economy, the surveillance society, the photographic representation of crime, young people and crime and the carnival of crime.  In addition, work of a more traditional nature is also being undertaken, for example in the fields of: international drug policy, the history of crime and punishment and violence.  For a full list of individual staff interests please see the staff tab of this web page.  The department also hosts a vibrant and innovative postgraduate programme and has taken on an increasing number of students with a criminological dimension to their research.  For more details on this aspect of our research please see the projects tab on this website.

For more information about cultural criminology in general, as well as the work currently being done at Kent, please visit our website at: http://www.culturalcriminology.org/

Young People, Crime and Social Justice

An exciting new subgroup of the crime, control and culture research cluster has recently been formed with a specific aim to research the issues of young people, crime and social justice.  This group brings together academics from across the University, external experts and practitioners.  It aims to share information on projects and opportunities and to support the development of research in this area.

Kent Criminal Justice Centre

The School is also home to the Kent Criminal Justice Centre (KCJC) which is a collaboration of senior researchers at the University of Kent based in SSPSSR, the Personal Social Services Research Unit and the Kent Law School. The core members have a multidisciplinary background, which includes sociology, economics, law and statistics, and expertise in sophisticated quantitative techniques, economic modelling and qualitative methods. KCJC has a national and international reputation for interdisciplinary research into the field of criminology and criminal justice. During recent years the Centre has responded to a high level demand from the Home Office for evaluative research that incorporates cost-effectiveness, while still ensuring responsiveness to local and regional needs and opportunities.

back to top

Staff

Dr Kate Bradley : charities, community groups, social and philanthropic movements in the twentieth century; youth justice and welfare; citizenship and civil society; juvenile delinquency and the youth courts; urban youth

Dr Phil Carney: the surveillance society; photographic depiction and identification; contemporary French social theory.

Dr Caroline Chatwin: patterns of illegal drug abuse; drug markets; criminological theory.

Professor Frank Furedi: risk consciousness; the diminishing of cultural authority and society's capacity to manage risk and change; terrorism and the management of risk after September 11.

Professor Chris Hale: how political debates around law and order have affected responses to crime; quantitative analysis of crime data, especially the relationships between crime and fear of crime with wider economic and social changes; evaluations of new interventions and crime reduction strategies; policing; youth crime.

Dr Keith Hayward: criminological theory; youth crime; popular culture; social theory; terrorism and fanaticism; cultural criminology.

Dr Derek Kirton: child welfare policy and practice, especially adoption and foster care; the relationship between the resourcing of foster care and the performance of fostering services; later life experiences of people growing up in the care system.

Dr Anne Logan: gender, criminal justice policymaking and social work c1900 to 1960, including the work of magistrates and other voluntary workers as well as professionals; the life and work of Margery Fry.

Professor Ann Netten: economic evaluation of criminal justice.

Dr Kate O’Brien: the night-time economy; drug markets; bouncers and private policing.

Professor Larry Ray: sociological theory; globalisation; race and ethnicity; violence.

Professor Jock Young: social exclusion and crime; immigration; causes and consequences of terrorism; criminological theory.

.

back to top

Projects

Dan Burrows

Dan’s Ph.D. takes a critical approach to the study of state terrorism and its application within American foreign policy. The thesis focuses in particular on US counter-insurgency practices in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, arguing that one of the key reasons when seeking to explain the scale and ferocity of violence associated with post-invasion Iraq is that US foreign policy objectives within Iraq, and the Middle East, were thought by Washington policy makers to be best served by an aggressive counter-insurgency policy that more often than not disregarded the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians.
db224@kent.ac.uk

Arnaud Dandoy

Arnaud’s doctoral research has taken up the challenge of creating a new ‘humanitarian criminology’, which has important implications for reorienting the study of humanitarian aid, humanitarian law and crime. His research addresses more particularly the issue of crimes committed against humanitarian aid actors and aims to reach a more sophisticated theorization of humanitarian security studies by interjecting perspectives drawn from critical and cultural criminology in security policy debates.
ad285@kent.ac.uk

Eleni Dimou

Eleni’s thesis “voices from the pavement” explores transgressive forms of music and dance as culture, in relation to power and resistance, within a more globalized focus of interest.  Using the multidisciplinary and critical spectrum of Cultural Criminology, it will attempt to bridge the conceptualization of power at a macropoltical level and the micropolitics of power in everyday life.  Through case studies the research will investigate the relationships between embodiment, emotions, desire, excitement, transgression and deviance.
ed77@kent.ac.uk

Alejandro Dodds

Alejandro is a graduate of Texas Christian University and East Kentucky University, and is undertaking research on criminological spaces around the El Paso border in Texas.
ad341@kent.ac.uk

Kevin Harris

Kevin is finishing his Ph.D. on the normative relationship between war, its public memory and the ethical environment of late modernity.

kh88@kent.ac.uk

Laura Hanson

Laura’s doctoral thesis offers both an historical overview of the way crime has traditionally been mapped within criminological discourse; and a critical review of contemporary crime mapping as an empirical criminological practice. Her thesis argues that contemporary "geographies of crime" are too often constructed in very abstract and dehumanizing ways. As a consequence, they obfuscate and thus hamper our true understanding of the spatial dimension of crime. By way of a corrective, her thesis employs a cultural criminological approach in an attempt to return to more cultural understandings of the geography of crime and transgression.
ljh29@kent.ac.uk

Matt Hinds-Aldrich

Matt’s research interests broadly coalesce around the contested claims about the State’s role in providing for the ‘public’s safety’.  Here public safety is viewed as both a precursor and alternative to the discourse surrounding the modern Welfare State. His doctoral research concerns one piece of that wider project, namely critiquing the common assumption that there is a distinct occupational culture in the fire service that can account for the current constitution of the fire service.  In particular, he is drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's notion of field to offer an alternative account.  He has previously written about the use of arson in protests to challenge the State and occupational deviance in the fire service. 
mh314@kent.ac.uk [26]

Zoe Kontaxi

Zoe’s Ph.D. research explores the possibility of terrorist activity during the 2012 Olympic Games. More specifically, her thesis argues that under the justification of 'protecting' and ensuring a safe Olympic environment, the politicians and cultural elites transform the mega event into a cultural carrier, promoting global ideologies of terror that permeate throughout society as the natural order of things or what is called 'common sense'.
zk20@kent.ac.uk

Vicky Millin

Vicky’s research is in the area of prostitution; specifically looking at adult female heterosexual street workers. She is examining the relationships formed between women and their clients and pimps/male partners and the violence encountered in the industry and intends to investigate both the dangerous nature of these relationships and the impact they have on women’s lives.
vcm6@kent.ac.uk

Fahid Qurashi

Fahid joined us from the University of Oxford and is currently researching the phenomenon of radicalisation of Muslim youth in the UK. His work critiques many of the prevailing terrorism narratives and attempts to bring forth a new approach to understanding the radicalism and extremism present amongst a minority of British Muslims groups. Rather than explicitly focussing on, and attempting to explain why a minority of British Muslims engage in violence and terrorism (which is what most of the literature on terrorism focuses on), the thesis draws particular attention to understanding why the vast majority of British Muslims do not engage in violence and terrorism given the universality of religion. In doing so it tries to detach some popular and prevailing notions associated with Islam and being Muslim, especially violence, terrorism, radicalism and extremism.
fq4@kent.ac.uk

Hannah Thurston
Hannah is currently undertaking cultural research, focusing specifically on the continuation of capital punishment in Texas.  Her thesis analyses the tangled discourses that have woven together to form Texan culture. More specifically, it draws upon historical text to chronologically consider the role of concepts such as vigilantism, violence, justice and security in order to locate (modern) capital punishment within a contemporary setting and further understand its cultural and symbolic significance. 
ht203@kent.ac.uk

back to top

Publications

• Hayward, K. J., and Hobbs, D., (2007) 'Beyond the binge in Booze Britain: market led liminalization and the spectacle of binge drinking', British Journal of Sociology, 58 (3) 437-456
• Hayward, K. J., and Young, J (2007) 'Cultural criminology' in Maguire, M., Morgan, R., and Reiner (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 4th Edition, Oxford : Oxford University Press
• Hayward, K. J., (2007) 'Situational crime prevention and its discontents: rational choice theory versus the 'culture of now' ' Social Policy and Administration, 41 (3) 432-450
• Hayward , K. J., and Yar, M., (2006) 'The 'Chav' phenomenon: consumption, media and the construction of a new underclass', Crime, Media, Culture , Volume 2 (1) 9-28
  
• O'Brien, K, Hobbs , D and Westmarland, L (2008) ‘Negotiating Violence and Gender: Security and the Night Time Economy in the UK ', in S. Gendrot and P. Spierenburg (eds.) Collection on Historical and Contemporary Violence in Europe New York : Springer.
• Presdee, M. (2005) 'Burning Issues: Fire Carnival and Crime' in Soothill, K. and Peelo, M. (2005) Controversies about Crime. London : Willan.
• Presdee, M. (2005) 'Working it Out' in Muzzatti, P Reflections from the Wrong Side of the Tracks: Class Identity and the Working Class Experience in Academe. (2005)
• Presdee, M. (2004) 'Cultural Criminology: The Long and Winding Road .' Special Edition, Theoretical Criminology . Vol 8:3.
• Presdee, M. (2004) ' The Story of Crime : Biography and the excavation of transgression.' in Ferrell, Hayward, Morrison and Presdee (eds.), Cultural Criminology Unleashed. London: Cavendish.
• Young, J. (2007)  The Vertigo of late modernity  Sage

back to top

Events

ENGAGING ETHNOGRAPHIES
Crime, Culture, Control research cluster seminar series 2009

This year, the CCC group will be hosting a themed seminar series that will explore the interplay between theory and the ethnographic enterprise within the field of crime, criminal justice and deviance.  Invited speakers are all early career academics.   It is intended that the series will provide them with the opportunity to showcase their ethnographic work and to explore how they have engaged with theory.

Date	Speaker	Topic
21 October 2009 14:00-15:00	Dr Jonathan Ilan, University of Kent	The Biographies and Biography of a Dublin Street Gang
29 January 2010	Dr Jennifer Fleetwood, University of Kent	Researching female drug mules in Ecuador prisons: Ethnographic reflections.
2 February 2010	Professor Mark Hamm, Indiana State University	Prison-based terrorists: The spectacular few
31 March 2010	Professor Larry Herzog, San Diego State University	Defensible space, Latinos and the U.S.-Mexico border
12 May 2010	Dr Rachela Colosi, University of Lincoln	Lap Dancing: Leisure or Sex Encounter

 

back to top