Thirty years of criminology at HKU: themes and trends in crime and its control

Abstract

Purpose This paper, aims to contribute to the wider project of understanding the production of knowledge about crime and justice and, “to cultivate and sustain a reflexive awareness about the conditions under which such knowledge is (or is not) produced” (Loader and Sparks, 2012, p. 6). In reviewing the core issues and concerns about crime and control from the 1980s as articulated in these research dissertations, the authors seek to be self-reflexive about academic criminology as a field of enquiry in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach In this research, 209 dissertations, completed between 1988 and 2015, are categorized on the basis of the main subject or theme of investigation carried out by each of the research paper. Findings and originality/value This discussion is among the first and few attempts to look at the development of criminology in the Hong Kong China region and draws from the unique perspectives of practitioners – those working on the front lines – in their attempts to understand crime and its control with a criminological imagination.