SCCJR Bulletin: August 2020

NOVEMBER 2020

Dear friends,

The clocks have changed, the nights are drawing in, and the mercury is falling. Winter is coming fast.

As we move into those long lonely nights, I am warmed by some of the new ways that SCCJR have developed to work remotely. Our annual lecture yesterday took place online, meaning friends and colleagues near and far were able to join together under our virtual roof. The SCCJR seminar series, on Friday lunchtimes, offers a friendly social space for creative and critical thinking. And our new podcast series, Just Humans, is designed to bring our work straight into your ears, exploring ideas of darkness and light, connectedness and hope.

There are other rays of light to be found amid the gloom. I’m delighted to welcome Dr Gemma Flynn to the SCCJR team. Gemma will be working with SCCJR colleagues to develop new learning resources for both schools and universities that assist in navigating the virtual learning world (if you have any ideas, she would love to hear from you). And we have plans afoot for a new round of development grants, and webinars, in the new year.

In the meantime, I hope everyone is staying safe and well.

Yours,

Alistair Fraser
Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research

The Scotland in Lockdown study is a Chief Scientist Office (CSO) funded rapid research project involving a team of 28 including many from SCCJR. We have completed 140 interviews, nearly 90 prisoner surveys/letters received and 63 organisational surveys completed looking at issues of refugee/asylum status, CJS involvement, Domestic abuse and sexual violence experience, disability and health condition experience in Scotland during lockdown.

Check our main study website as we are releasing early and emergent findings via blogs and short articles. While recruitment has now closed for interviews, we are collecting lockdown stories from anyone in Scotland so please do share: https://www.lockdownstories.co.uk
And keep an eye out for the final report at the end of November.

At the University of Stirling Fiona Copland (PI) with Faculty colleagues, Maria Fotopoulou (CI), Maggie Grant (CI) and Paul Rigby (CI), have been awarded funding for a 14-month project ‘Supporting separated migrant children to thrive during Covid-19’. This project will examine how Covid has impacted on the young people’s connectivity to networks and services and will deliver an arts-based intervention to support their English language development.

The Understanding Inequalities project team were delighted to have the opportunity to work with graphic artist Miranda Smith, who used data and findings provided by Professor Susan McVie (Edinburgh) to create the data comic "How crime has changed in Scotland".

We offer our warmest congratulations to Professor Susan McVie (Edinburgh) for her election as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, which was announced on 15th October.

Clark, A., Fraser, A. and Hamilton-Smith, N. (2020) Networked territorialism: The routes and roots of organised crime. Trends in Organised Crime. Online first. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12117-020-09393-9

Fraser, A. and Sandberg, S. (2020) Bourdieu on the Block: Punishment, Policing and the Street. Virtual Special Issue of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/crj/bourdieu-and-criminology

Soon to be published: Measuring Justice: Defining Concepts, Developing Practice, by S Armstrong, P. McCulloch, B. Weaver and D. Reed, a report on a Scottish Government funded project under the experiences of justice grant call.

We have a busy schedule of events throughout November and December.

Click on each image below to go to the relevant Eventbrite page and register your place at any of our SCCJR Seminars from;

Dr Cara Jardine,' Families, Imprisonment and Legitimacy: The Cost of Custodial Penalties' book launch. (13 Nov)
Dr Brendan Marsh, 'The Logic of Violence: An ethnography of Dublin's Illegal Drug Trade' (20 Nov)
Prof Biko Agozino, 'Counter-Colonial Criminology: The Decolonization of Neo-Colonial Reason' (4 Dec)

And thank you to Dr Victoria Canning, University of Bristol, who gave our first SCCJR Seminar on 'Zemiology at the border: addressing asylum harms in Northern Europe.'

Past Presentations

Sarah Armstrong (Glasgow) is giving the keynote talk at the annual Forensic Managed Care Network Research Conference, 5 November: “Keeping Safe vs. Keeping Well: The value of life in confined places”.

Emiline Smith and Julie Berg (Glasgow) and Katie Lowe (University of Hong Kong) organised an online conference, 'Online Teaching Pathways for Early-Career Criminologists & Sociologists' earlier in October. It was the first of two conferences funded by the Universitas 21 Researcher Resilience Fund.
The conference sought to provide a platform for ECRs and PGRs to share the challenges that the recent push for online teaching has brought and collaboratively think through potential opportunities and solutions to this. The second conference will be taking place in February 2021 and will focus on online research skills, again aimed at Criminology and Sociology ECRs and PhDs. The conference will again be organised on Zoom and promoted via Eventbrite - please keep an eye out for any updates.

On 24 October, Marguerite Schinkel (Glasgow) and colleagues, supported by SCCJR funding, ran a workshop with academics, activists and community groups: ‘Not Reform: Stimulating Radical Thinking and Action on the Penal Practices of Scotland’ to start a conversation with further events planned throughout 2020-21.

Check out our new podcast which launched last week called Just Humans.

In our first episode Dr Anna Souhami from the University of Edinburgh discusses her fascinating work on policing in Shetland and how darkness impacts on the daily lives of those who live there.

You can find us on most major platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud and Google podcast

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Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research · Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson Street · University of Glasgow · Glasgow, Scotland G12 8LR · United Kingdom