2007

December 2007

BSC North West Regional Group Conference

CRaS is pleased to give advance notice of the BSC North West Regional Group Conference, Friday 1st February 2008, 'Crime, Community and Justice'

The concepts of ‘crime’, ‘community’ & ‘Justice’ assume a level of coherence within contemporary debates in criminology and criminal justice. The concepts are etched into policy and practice discourses across a wide range of statutory and non-statutory agencies. Both academic and politicised renderings of these concepts comprise key sources of debate and contestation. This conference will provide an opportunity for researchers, policy makers and practitioners from a range of agencies to reflect upon such concepts as they apply at different social and spatial scales (the city’, ‘the neighbourhood’ …) where their meaning and application become manifest and controversial. The conference will cover Theoretical Debates, New Directions in Policy and Practice and Living ‘Crime’, ‘Community’ and ‘Justice’. Speakers and participants include: Professor Gordon Hughes, Cardiff University, Dr Roy Coleman, University of Liverpool, Liverpool City Council Youth Service, Community Justice Centre, Probation Service and grass roots agencies. Contact: Maureen Chu to reserve a place on: 0151 794 2996 or email: M.Chu@liverpool.ac.uk

 Guest Speaker

Dr Eileen Berrington welcomed a guest speaker to the university on 3rd December. Pauline Campbell spoke about the numbers of women who have died within the prison system over recent years. Pauline Campbell is the bereaved mother of Sarah, her 18-year-old daughter, who died in Styal prison in January 2003. Since that time Pauline has campaigned for justice, organising numerous demonstrations outside jails where women have died. She has been arrested 12 times since her bereavement but remains a vociferous critic of the policy of jailing vulnerable women.

November 2007

 

BBC Radio Manchester

Dr Helen Jones took part in the breakfast show to give listeners an overview of the problems rape complainants have in securing justice through the criminal courts. With a current conviction rate of 5.8% there is a serious justice gap for complainants. The government is announcing measures (28th Nov) which might help to improve the current situation.

 

 

 

Launch Event

 

 

Public forum on 'Whose Violence? Whose Security?'

together with the launch of the Crime, Risk and Security (CRaS) Research Group

This took place on Thursday 22nd November at Manchester Metropolitan University where CRaS welcomed Steve Tombs, Professor of Sociology, Liverpool John Moores University, Barbara Hudson, Professor in Law, UCLAN and Farhat Khan, Women Asylum Seekers Together (WAST) and other WAST members.

 

 

Helen Jones is attending the American Society of Criminology  Annual Conference in Atlanta where she will be presenting a paper 'Cross Cultural Criminology: An International Exchange' 

September 2007

Dr Peter Rogers was elected as a council member and trustee of the British Sociological Association.

A busy summer saw Drs Berringtonand Jones provide consultancy to the Rape and Sexual Assault Centre in Merseyside in helping them to draft a history of the centre since it began in 1986.

Dr Helen Jones is advising on a public awareness campaign by Vancouver Rape Crisis to celebrate their 35th birthday next year

Dr Helen Jones was approached by a researcher from the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, about the passage of the CEDAW Bill in Nigeria.

Glasgow:UK

Dr Peter Rogers presented at the European Sociological Association annual conference, where he also took part in a roundtable table discussion with the edtiors of 'Sociology' and Sage publishers regarding issues and future themes for the British Sociological Associations 'Sociology' Journal.

July 2007

Manchester:UK

Peter Rogers will be presenting at the MISST inaugural conference 'Everyday Life in the Global City, July 6th-9th 2007. His paper advances the PhD research 'Young Poeple, Urban Management and Public Space: Reconciling Social Exclusion and Urban Renaissance' by developing Lefebvre's rythmanalytical project in the context of social exclusion. The paper uses this theoretical lens to critically unpack the increasing imbalance between expressive public activity, governance of the city centre and renaissance driven regeneration suggesting that trends of revanchism are increasingly embedded in the policies for urban renewal and management of social order.

Amsterdam:Netherlands

Joanne Massey will be giving a virtual presentation of her paper 'Young People and the 'Right' to the City' at the International Conference on Diversity in Amsterdam at the beginning of July. The paper draws on conceptions of the 'Right' to the city as outlined in Mitchell's (2003) work. It is hoped the paper will be published in the International Journal of Diversity once it hasbeen peer reviewed. For more details on the paper see the Abstract

HEA annual conference July 2007

'e-communication unleashed'

Dr Helen Jones will consider the expansion of an existing criminology project which began when a UK and a US academic engaged their students in penpal type activity and which now encompasses seven universities in the UK and the US.

June 2007

London:UK

Dr Peter Rogers was invited to attend the London School of Economics and Political Science, Centre for Civil Society conference on "Aid, Security and Civil Society in the Post 9-11 Context" at Goodenough College. This is part of the ESRC and LSE Non-Governmental Public Action Programme.

London:UK

Patrick Williams was invited to attend the Active Change Foundation symposium on 'Engaging at Grass Roots with Excluded & Vulnerable Young People' focussing on Radical recruitment in partnership with the MET police Waltham Forest, ACPO, and the Defence Academy.

Sheffield Halam University: UK

Teaching Criminology

This is a cross-disciplinary workshop, organised in collaboration with the Higher Education Academy Subject Centres for Law (UKCLE), Sociology, Anthropology and Politics (C-SAP), and Social Policy and Social Work (SWAP)

 'e-learning and criminology', Dr Helen Jones

 This session will discuss the impact of international collaboration within criminology, and show how this model can be used by other disciplines

 

  

HMP & YOI Styal, Cheshire:UK

 

 

Dr Eileen Berrington and Dr Helen Jones were independent observers at a prison-death demonstration on Wednesday 13 June 2007 at HMP & YOI Styal, Cheshire. This was the 24th demonstration to be held outside women's prisons in England since protests began in 2004. The protest was about the death of Helen Mary Cole, 48, who died in the care of HMP & YOI Styal on 3 June 2007. Helen Mary Cole is the fifth woman to die from apparently self-inflicted injuries in women's jails so far this year, a figure that already exceeds the number of women's deaths for the whole of last year. Mrs Cole died less than 48 hours after arriving at HMP Styal. She was on remand, located in the 'first night centre', and was not on 'suicide watch'. Pauline Campbell, the organiser of the protest, requested the Governor (Steve Hall) to speak to protesters at the prison gates. Governor Steve Hall was on duty, but instead Mr C. Bailey came out to speak to protesters. He was accompanied by Ms Lucy Merrick, Head of Psychology; both declined to comment on Helen Cole's death. Read more here -

Read the News article

 

 

 

 

London: UK

 

Dr Helen Jones attended the Inter-ministerial Stakeholder Group on Sexual Violence in Whitehall, London.

 

 

GRANT AWARD

 

Dr Peter Rogers was awarded a 'Promising Research Fellowship' by MMU Research, Enterprise and Development Office (RED). This entails a 10 week secondment to the RED office in which Peter will develop grant proposals, attend top tier management committees and focus on developing future research and publications in the area of urban resilience, civil contingencies and social control.

 

 

 

May 2007

 

Media

 

Dr Helen Jones was asked to contribute to the national End Violence Against Women Blog. The article is about a court case where a barrister made inappropriate comments about a rape complainant.

"The barrister, Sheilagh Davies, has made unsupported allegations about the character and the actions of the rape complainant. The complainants dress-size has no bearing on this case at all and this is little more than another example of the mobilization of rape myths to attack the credibility of a rape complainant".

Read the ARTICLE

 

 

 

Ormskirk: UK

 

 

Dr Eileen Berrington and Dr Helen Jones presented at the SOLSTICE conference Edge Hill University - Reflection v Soundbites: the potential of VLEs to enhance the quality of students’ communication, participation and learning Conference Abstract

 

Media

 

 

Dr Helen Jones was asked to contribute to the national End Violence Against Women Blog. The article is about the killings at the university campus in Virginia.

"As the world’s media retreat from Virginia, it is worth looking at how the tragedy of the campus shootings has been interpreted and how a feminist analysis can go beyond the reports of the past week".

Read the ARTICLE

 

 

 

April 2007

 

Australia

 

 

Prof Scott Poynting speaks on ABC Radio  in Australia.

One thing the study of moral panics can show is that the more we learn to hunt for demons, the more demons we see. Yet the evil we are looking for may well be among our own; it may be frightfully ordinary and everyday.

 

 

 

 

Brighton: UK

 

 

Dr Helen Jones presented a lecture and seminar to graduate students at Brighton University on the subject of 'Rape: A Four Lettered Word'.

 

 

 

 

London:UK

 

 

Dr Helen Jones presented at the 2007 British-Irish Section of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control. The conference was entitled “Things Can Only Get Better": Crime and Deviance after Ten Years of New Labour and the paper, which focused on the efforts of the last ten years to improve justice to women in the aftermath of male violence, was entitled: F+ Must Try Harder: A Report Card to Government on Violence Against Women.

 

 

 

March 2007

 

 

Manchester:UK

International E-Communication Exchange Conference - Communicating Across Boundaries: E-communication on Criminal Justice Issues.

 

 This month Dr Helen Jones and Dr Eileen Berrington hosted an event to celebrate the fourth year of the International E-Communication Exchange IEE Project . The conference at Manchester Metropolitan University was opened by Professor Janet Beer, Dean and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Humanities, Law and Social Sciences. Other speakers included Dr Paula Wilcox, Senior Lecturer Brighton University; Maggie Sumner, Head of the Sociology Department Westminster University and Drs Kunselman and Johnson of the University of West Florida.

Over the past three years, a virtual communication exchange initiative has been providing students in the UK and the US with the opportunity to learn from each other. The initiative began in 2004 with a small-scale email exchange project between Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and the University of West Florida (UWF). Since then the International E-communication Exchange (IEE) has grown in scale and scope and now takes advantage of the functionality of the WebCT platform to deliver the exchange to over 400 students studying in six universities in the UK and the USA.