Emerald Studies in Activist Criminology draws together academics activists, progressive policy-makers and practitioners to encourage cutting-edge engagement with those working against negative impacts of crime controls on the lives of intersectionally disadvantaged groups in society to effect positive social change.
Aims and scope
Emerald Studies in Activist Criminology is a platform for those working to identify and address the harms of criminalisation and expansive social controls. It draws together academics, activists, progressive policy-makers and practitioners to encourage cutting edge engagement on topics to effect positive social change.
The historical relationships between criminology and activism are contentious. Since criminology in its administrative forms can facilitate increases in state and cultural controls, and was formed within this nexus of social order, the discipline is often complicit in acting on behalf of states and state-corporate collaborators. Critical criminology and zemiology, by contrast, have nurtured conditions under which power and hierarchy can be more fully addressed from radical perspectives, specifically in challenging state-centric focuses on crimes of the powerless. It is from these positions that Emerald Studies in Activist Criminology encourages engagement with those working against negative impacts of crime controls on the lives of intersectionally disadvantaged groups in society.
Emerald Studies in Activist Criminology seeks to examine the history of both recent and more established justice campaigns and interventions. It extends across a range of pre-existing sub-fields of criminology that engage in questions of effecting progressive change through activism, such as feminist criminology, juvenile justice, migrant rights, corporate and state crime, green/environmental criminology, sentencing and wrongful conviction, prisons, corrections and abolitionism, and justice for victim/survivors of harm and crime. Campaigns and movements – defensive and progressive – around these issues define what we mean by ‘activist’, while we view ‘criminology’ in its broadest, inter-disciplinary and social science inflected version.
This title is aligned with our fairer society goal
We are passionate about working with researchers globally to deliver a fairer, more inclusive society. This perhaps has never been more important than in today’s divided world.
