Promoting sociology in Australia
Facilitating sociology teaching and research
Enhancing the professional development of TASA members
Promoting sociology in Australia
Facilitating sociology teaching and research
Enhancing the professional development of TASA members
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
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.
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:
2007 (renewed June 2010)
David McCallum david.mccallum@vu.edu.au
Christine Bond christine.bond@qut.edu.au
International Key-note Speakers:
Professor Pat Carlen, University of Kent, UK
Professor Elliot Currie, University of California, US
Professor John Pratt, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
The full details are available for downloading in Word (47.5kb) and Pdf (141 kb)
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.
Click here for the 2008 Annual Report
