Criminology Seminar Series
Launched in 2015, the Criminology Seminar Series provides a platform for critical, path-breaking interdisciplinary research on crime, criminal justice and related themes by scholars within and beyond Birkbeck.
Attendance is free and open to all. Book your place by following the links below, or email the convenor, Sappho Xenakis.
Upcoming EVENTS
- The criminalisation of environmental and climate change activism: an international perspective
- Rising populism and the pitfalls of public messaging on organised crime and corruption
- Challenging prolonged solitary confinement in United States prisons: the Pelican Bay story
- Carceral citizenship and the Carceral State in Palestine/Israel
- The challenges of AI-generated evidence for the justice system
- Balancing consent to BDSM and protection from the 'rough sex defence'
- Subordinated inclusion: population sorting technologies as Uyghur digital confinement in Northwest China
PAST EVENTS
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2025
- Professor Roberta Mazza (University of Bologna) - 'The unsettling story of the Brothers Poem papyrus'.
- Professor Tanya Wyatt (FAcSS, Lead Researcher, Research and Trend Analysis Branch, UNODC) - 'The Landscape of Criminalization for Environmental Offences'.
- Professor Lilie Chouliaraki (LSE) - 'Reversals of victimhood as acts of power'.
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2024
- Dr Esmorie Miller (Lancaster University) 'Stigma and Penalty in the Everyday Lives of Black British Young Women: The Case of Child Q'
- Mark Knight (University of Warwick) 'Lessons from the History of British Corruption and Anti-corruption'
- Key speakers: (Antonio Marcelo Mangione, Marcelo Alejandro Blanco Puška, Sappho Xenakis, Marcos Flores Leyes) 'Green Criminology: A View from Argentina'
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2023
- Andrew Coyle (Kings College London) 'Prisons of the World'
- Professor Reece Walters (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) 'Ecocide, Climate Criminals and Planetary Destruction'
- Gregg Barak (Eastern Michigan University) Newsmaking Criminology, Donald Trump, and the Crimes of the Powerful'
- Dr Emma Russell (La Trobe University) 'Seeing Like a Cop': Visual and Colonially in spaces of gendered criminalisation
- Professor Dawn L. Rothe (Florida Atlantic University) and Professor Victoria E. Collins (Eastern Kentucky University) 'The Harms and Crimes of the Powerful'
- Professor Richard Moorhead (FAcSS, Professor of Law and Professional Ethics, University of Exeter) 'The Post Office Scandal: Professional Pathologies and Legality Illusions'
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2022
- Professor Julian Go, University of Chicaho: 'A "Civil" Police? Empire, Race and Militarised Policing in Britain and the US'
- Professor Jessica Jacobson and Professor Mike Hough, ICPR and Birkbeck, University of London: 'Sentencing, Mitigation and Guilty Pleas'
- Dr Elena Mamoulaki, Hellenic Mediterranean University: 'Symbiosis in Exile: Political Detainees and Local Community on an Aegean Island during the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949'
- Professor Reece Walters, Deakin University, Australia
- Tasseli McKay (Duke University) 'The Time is (Never) Right For Reparations'
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2021
- Dr Irene Zempi, Nottingham Trent University: 'Misogyny As Hate Crime (video)'
- Dr Monish Bhatia, Birkbeck, University of London: 'Gendered Racism and Criminal Justice System: Punishing Illegalised Migrant Mothers from the Global South'
- Professor Alex Stevens, University of Kent: 'The Politics of Being an Expert: A Critical Realist Auto-ethnography of Drug Policy Advisory Panels in the UK (video)'
- Dr Grietje Baars, City, University of London: 'Smash the corporation! Extending abolition beyond prisons and the police to capitalism and the corporate form (link to Dr Baars' book 'The Corporation, Law and Capitalism)'
- Professor Bill Bowring, Birkbeck, University of London: 'Can Victims Gain Anything from Bringing States Before International Legal Mechanisms?'
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2020
- Professor Neil Chakraborti, University of Leicester: 'Challenging Hate Crime in Challenging Times (video)'
- Dr Aviah Day, Birkbeck: 'Survived and Punished: Arrest and Conviction of Survivors of Domestic Violence (video)'
- Professor Conor Gearty, LSE: 'Torture Then and Now: The Role of Judges (video)'
- Professor Virgina Mantouvalou, UCL: 'Modern Slavery and Structures of Exploitation (video)'
- Professor Clifford Stott, University of Keele: 'Policing COVID-19: Theory, Policy & Practice (video)'
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2019
- Dr Jennifer Fleetwood, Goldsmiths: 'Telling Crime Stories'
- Dr Harry Annison, University of Southampton: 'Families of Indeterminate-Sentenced Prisoners, and the Sociology of Punishment'
- Professor Penny Green, Queen Mary University of London and Professor Tony Ward, Northumbria University: 'State Crime and Civil Activism: A Comparative Study (video
- Professor Majid Yar, Lancaster University: 'A Failure to Regulate? The Demands and Dilemmas of Tackling Illegal Content and Behaviour on Social Media (video)'
- Dr Aleksandra Jordanoska, King's College London: 'Taming the markets: policing misconduct in financial services (video)'
- Dr Tanya Serisier, Birkbeck, University of London with Dr Kiran Grewal, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Professor Alison Phipps, University of Sussex: 'Book launch Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics (Palgrave, 2018) (audio)'
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2018
- Dr Daniela Nadj, Queen Mary, University of London: 'Women, wartime sexual violence and the interpretation of gender in the contemporary international criminal trial (video)'
- Professor David Whyte, University of Liverpool: 'Corporate autonomy and the corporate death penalty (video)'
- Professor Katharine Biber, University of Technology, Sydney: 'In crime's archive: the cultural afterlife of evidence (video)'
- Professor David Nelken, King's College London: 'Transnational social prescriptions and "standardising comparisons'''
- Professor Steve Tombs, Open University: 'From corporate killing to social murder (video)'
- Dr Andrew Dilts, Loyola Marymount University: 'Abolitionist killjoys, carceral enjoyments, and the social life of social death (video)'
- Professor Eamonn Carrabine, University of Essex: 'Exhibiting crime and punishment: dark tourism and the aftermath of trauma'
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2017
- Professor Jo Phoenix, Open University: 'Against queer criminology: For a criminology of sex and sexualities (video)'
- Professor Barbara Owen, California State University: 'Confronting inequality in women's imprisonment'
- Nesam McMillan, University of Melbourne: 'Imagining the international: crime, justice and community on the global stage'
- Professor Yvonne Jewkes, University of Brighton: 'The modern architecture of incarceration: from spectacular statement of sovereign power to (an)aesthetic symbol of public indifference'
- Professor Phil Scraton, Queen's University Belfast: 'Hillsborough: resisting injustice, uncovering truth'
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2016
- Nicholas Lord, University of Manchester: 'Twenty-first-century corporate "justice": criminalising the failure to prevent crime (video)'
- Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham: 'The EU's "refugee crisis" and the production of "illegality" (video)'
- Tanya Serisier, Birkbeck, University of London, 'Speaking out online: has social media changed responses to sexual violence?'
- Professor Didier Bigo, Kings College London: 'Digital surveillance and everyday democracy: the advent of transnational guilds of sensitive information worldwide (video)'
- Professor Bill Bowring, Birkbeck, University of London: 'Double standards at the International Criminal Court: is there a brighter future for global justice?'
- Professor Phil Scraton, Queen's University Belfast: 'Hillsborough: resisting injustice, uncovering truth'
- Professor Peter Kraska, Eastern Kentucky University: 'Academic complicity in USA police militarization'
- Professor Sandra Walklate, University of Liverpool: 'Bare your body, bare your soul? The historical traces of war's violence(s) on violence against women'
- Professor Nigel South, University of Essex: 'Climate change, authoritarianism and denial: disconnected policy, free trade and ecocidal trends'
- Vanessa Barker, Stockholm University: 'Crimmigration in Sweden: bans on begging and the logic of benevolent violence'
- Professor Susanne Karstedt, Griffith University: 'On the importance of values: solidarity and punishment in contemporary societies'
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2015
- Professor Mike Hough, Institute for Criminal Policy Research, Birkbeck, University of London: 'Why does punitivity vary across country? Penal practice and public attitudes to punishment in comparative perspective'
- Professor Leila Simona Talani, King's College London: 'Money laundering in the City of London: London as a laundry of choice'
- Professor Ben Bowling, King's College London: 'Theorising crimmigration control'
- Kate Meagher, London School of Economics: 'Entrepreneurship, criminality and tipping points: clandestine trade in East and West Africa'
- Professor Vincenzo Ruggiero, Middlesex University: 'Financial crime and early criminology: the ambiguity of a concept forged in the eighteenth century'