Promoting sociology in Australia
Facilitating sociology teaching and research
Enhancing the professional development of TASA members
Crime and Governance
TASA Crime and Governance Thematic Group Symposium, Brisbane, 25 Sept 2009.
Matthew Ball, Michael Cerruto, Tara Renae McGee, Grazyna Zajdow, John Scott, Christine Bond, Samantha Jeffries, Murray Lee, Kerry Carrington, Gavin Kendall, Natalie Scerra, Melissa Bull, David McCallum, Pat O’Malley, Cassandra Cross, Margaret Per, Roberta Julian, Santi Owen, and Max Travers.
You can listen to the public lecture by Professor Kerry Carrington: HERE
WORKSHOP 30 June 2010
The Crime and Governance Thematic Group of the Australian Sociological
Association (TASA), in conjunction with the Sydney Institute of
Criminology at University of Sydney, are running a workshop on
ethnography, crime and governance at the Sydney Law School University of
Sydney on 30 June 2010, the day before the Critical Criminology
Conference.
The aim of the workshop is to present qualitative research about
different aspects of the criminal justice process, regulatory agencies,
and how crime is understood and experienced within communities. More
generally, we are looking for researchers who are interested in
reflecting on the value of ethnography and discourse analysis in
researching crime and governance.
If you are interested in presenting, please contact Max Travers, School
of Sociology and Social Work, University of Tasmania
(max.travers@utas.edu.au). We particularly encourage PhD students to
consider participating in the workshop. There will be a formal call for
papers in late January.
About The Crime and Governance Thematic Group
Aims and objectives:
This thematic group brings together TASA members with interests in processes of criminalisation, the sociology of deviance, criminology, governance and social control. The group will participate at annual conferences with themed papers and encourage lively debate amongst members. It will also be used as a platform for the wider stimulation of interest in these fields of sociology. The group will meet to discuss current issues and research in Australia, as well as plan future activities of the group.
Rationale:
The sociology of crime and deviance has long been a traditional and yet dynamic part of the sociological field dating back to seminal figures such as Emile Durkheim (1895) and prior to this ‘moral statisticians’ such as Adolphe Quetelet and A. M. Guerry. While strain (Merton 1949) and social disorganisation (Shaw and McKay 1942) theories influenced public policy throughout the mid twentieth century, more recently work on ‘moral panics’ (Cohen 1972; Young 1971), and indeed the term moral panic, have entered the popular imagination and lexicon giving the field currency with the general public. Recent work in this area (see for example Poynting and Morgan 2007), while highlighting its contemporary significance, also reminds us of the need to encourage development and dynamism (see also McRobbie and Thornton 1995). So while this thematic group would seek to include within it the sociology of crime and deviance it would also encourage members with broader interests in governance – the more recent and developing field of governmentality studies comes to mind here – and other work focusing on crime, social control and social reaction. The need for such a forum is also obvious given current socio-political climates where fear and exclusion combine with historically high levels of some offending behaviours and often result in punitive social control measures. Moreover, there is a need for sociology to reclaim this ground in an era when the psy-sciences and individuation often create individual pathology out of what sociologists would recognise as socially produced or constructed issues. Thus, the group would seek to increase the public profile of this area of sociology while also acting as a forum to move the area forward and apply it to contemporary issues impacting the Australian and world communities.
Preliminary points of focus for the group include but are not limited to:
- Sociology of deviance
- Governance and social control
- Criminology
- Crime
- Historical sociology encompassing these areas
- Crime Theory
- Social reactions to crime
- Crime and the media
- Socio-legal studies
Year established:
2007 (renewed June 2010)
Convenors and contact details:
David McCallum david.mccallum@vu.edu.au
Christine Bond chris.bond@uq.edu.au
Members:
- Murray Lee (University of Sydney)
- Tara Renae McGee (Queensland University of Technology)
- Gavin Kendall (Queensland University of Technology)
- Angela Dwyer (Queensland University of Technology)
- Kerry Carrington (Queensland University of Technology)
- Samantha Jeffries (Queensland University of Technology)
- Terry Hutchinson (Queensland University of Technology)
- Matthew Ball (Queensland University of Technology)
- Michael Cerruto (Queensland University of Technology)
- Christine Bond (University of Queensland)
- Rebecca Wickes (University of Queensland)
- John Scott (University of New England)
- David McCallum (Victoria University)
- Santi Owen (Queensland Corrective Services)
- Roberta Julian (University of Tasmania)
- Max Travers (University of Tasmania)
- Lisa Rosevear (University of Tasmania)
- Nicole Asquith (University of Bradford)
- Grazyna Zajdow (Deakin University)
- Natalie Scerra (University of Western Sydney)
- Scott Poynting (Manchester Metropolitan University)
- Greg Martin (University of Sydney)
- Melissa Bull (Griffith University)
- Glenn Dawes (James Cook University)
- Deirdre Howard-Wagner (University of Sydney)
- Margaret Pereir (University of Sydney)
- Peter Rogers (Macquarie University)
- Michael Salter (University of New South Wales)
- Ben Wadham (Flinders University)
Annual reports:
Click here for the 2008 Annual Report