Crime and Justice in an Age of Global Insecurity: Notes on the British Society of Criminology Annual Conference 2007

Abstract

This year the Karl Mannheim Centre for Criminology at The London School of Economics hosted the 2007 annual conference of the British Society of Criminology between the 18th and 20th of September. Some 280 papers, two plenary sessions and a number of “author meets critics” sessions gave insight into the diverse fields of criminological research in the UK and abroad. The conference's theme was programmatic: “Crime and Justice in an Age of Global Insecurity”. The notion of insecurity, expressing a globalized experience and an ontological status of the human being in late modernity, termed a historical period of time. It fits to a conjuncture of theorizing the uncanniness of contemporary social life. In this way, the theme of the conference is partly to write the history of the present in terms of crime and justice. Such conferences are both a witness of the social processes surrounding the issues of crime and criminal justice, and an agent of change by providing directives for the future, thereby shaping the way in which criminologists look at the social world.