New Directions in Critical Criminology Conference
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
May 6-7, 2016
The critical in critical criminology is by no means self-evident. It variously means that we are critical of existing social arrangements which we view as causing harm, including but not limited to 'crime', and that we are critical of traditional criminology and the ways in which it conceptualizes and theorizes crime and punishment. It extends to a forceful critique of dominant responses to harm including ones that issue from mainstream criminology. It certainly means inquiry into the political and everyday (always political) grounds of crime and punishment, usually guided by a critique of neoliberalism, racism, sexism and other forces with which these co-operate and which produce crime, both discursively and materially – crime as acts so treated and crime as harm. Above all, it means that our criminology is infused with our values like all scholarship, and so we maintain a self-aware and reflexive stance on the work.
Believing that the work of critical criminologists can inform a more just and less harmful world, the organizers of New Directions in Critical Criminology welcome scholars and activists to Knoxville, Tennessee May 6-7, 2016. Please join us for the conversation. We foresee a grappling with issues of race, gender, sexualities, nationalities, borders, cultures, identities, power, and resistance, against crime, harm, justice, injustice, and the field of criminology itself. We will investigate a myriad of contemporary harms, to people, non-humans, and the environment, through direct bloodletting and through manipulation of life options. Finally, we will both revisit time-honored approaches within the critical canon and we will use more recently (re)developed tools that investigate crime and punishment/criminal justice as cultural-cum-aesthetic projects, as investments of emotional energies and as the creative realization of individual and group biographies.