Rurality and crime: A critical symposium
An Advancing Rural and Regional Culture and Society (AARCS) symposium
Many critical criminologists question whether there is an epistemology of crime. Our objective is to contemplate what it means to think about rurality and crime. What impacts do urban theories and practices have in distorting our understandings of the specifics and diversities of rural experience? What conceptions of rurality and issues relating to security and place have for our understandings of crime in other contexts?
This blended face-to-face and online seminar aims to interrogate these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective that moves from conventional criminological research methods to other communication, literary and artistic forms. Our emphasis is to develop a network of scholars committed to the critical interrogation of crime, which includes criminal enforcement, prosecution, punishment, harm minimisation and notions of security with specific reference to notions of community, place and space that constitute diverse notions of rurality. We seek expressions of interest for potential chapters and discussion points on a range of topics, including, and not restricted to:
- Defining the rural and notions of plurality versus generality
- Interrogating the meaning of place: places of crime, harm and justice
- Rurality and crime histories
- Policing, courts and rural justice industries
- Rurality, natural environments and crime, including water, desert, trees, ecology
- Rural violence
- Rural security
- Rurality, crime and communication
- State crime, state neglect
- Rurality, law and jurisdiction
We are seeking expressions of interest on any of these or additional topics of interest that give primacy to thinking about the rural in the broad contexts of criminal harm, law making, enforcement (or non-enforcement) and justice administration. In this sense, we wish to question both prevailing understandings of the rural, as well as ideas about justice both in historic and contemporary forms. We aim to develop ideas and proposals into an edited collection or special edition of a leading journal.
Dates: 12-13 November 2024
Venue: Waurn Ponds Estate / Blended
For further details and proposed thematic ideas please contact Ian Warren ([email protected]) and D’Arcy Molan ([email protected]).