CrimNet

2 September 2024

Prof. Michael Welch

Title: “Narrating ‘Outcast’ Culture in Australia: Sited-ness and the Technologies of Performance”

The conversion of former prisons into museums has emerged as a popular trend, prompting what some scholars refer to as a form of “dark tourism.” Going beyond mere entertainment, however, many prison museums and related exhibitions are designed to tap into significant historical transformations in ways that convey a deeper cultural meaning. Accordingly, this project takes aim at a host of institutions in Australia that once confined convicts, criminals, and Aboriginal people as well as other “outcasts.” The purpose is to interpret the technologies of performance that narrate the stories of those incarcerated, especially along lines of weaponization, romanticization, and memorialization. Relying on an archive of photographs taken at sites in Sydney, Hobart, Fremantle, and Melbourne, the presentation offers new insights into unifying themes and divergent pathways into “outcast” culture.

Prof. Murray Lee

Title: Soundscapes of Incarceration

The sonic environments of carceral settings have only recently become of interest to criminology and related disciplines. Yet, these 'acoustemologies' provide a constant inescapable soundtrack for prisoners. Such sonic environments are often materially constructed from concrete and metal and can be loud, reverberating, confusing, alienating, and at times almost completely silent. Moreover, being sensitive to sound in conditions where violence is a distinct possibility can mean the difference between life and death. This multimedia presentation (paper and sound installation) discusses the problematic nature of sound in prisons drawing on emerging frameworks such as sensory and sonic criminology, the scholarship on affective soundscapes, musicology and sound-design. It also explores prison sounds through creative constructions based on prison field recordings and seeks to highlight the roles, problematic and otherwise, of sound in carceral environments. 

Date & Time: Wednesday, 4 September 2024 ; 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM. 

Venue: New Law Building, Level 4, Seminar Room 403

Professor Tim Prenzler, Professor of Criminology at the University of the Sunshine Coast, has released a new book titled Preventing Crime and Disorder in Public Places: Blending Opportunity Reduction, Guardianship, and Welfare.

Available here.

Current Issues in Criminal Justice (CICJ) provides detailed analysis of national and international issues by a range of outstanding contributors. It includes contemporary comments, with discussion at the cutting edge of the crime and justice debate, as well as reviews of recently released books.

CICJ accepts submissions on a rolling basis.

Editor: Professor Colin King, member of the Sydney Institute of Criminology

You can access current (Volume 36 (3), 2024) and previous issues of Current Issues in Criminal Justice here.

If you have a book suitable for review by CICJ, please email the books editor, Celine Van Golde at celine.vangolde@sydney.edu.au 

For more updates, follow CICJ on X here.

 We are pleased to invite you to webinar co-hosted by the European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control (HEUNI) and the Australian institute of Criminology (AIC) that explores sexual exploitation of children in Australia, and the role of technology in the facilitation of child sexual exploitation on Tuesday 10th September 2024  4-5:30 pm (AEST, Canberra time).

In this webinar, HEUNI discusses coercive control in the context of criminal investigations, particularly within the context of trafficking in human beings. The webinar introduces research findings on interviewing victims of trafficking and provides concrete suggestions for how to incorporate the aspect of coercive control in investigative interviews.

Speakers

• Julia Korkman, adjunct professor (docent) in legal psychology; President of the European Association of Psychology and Law; Senior Programme Officer at HEUNI
• Noora Halmeenlaakso, Detective Senior Sergeant, National Bureau of Investigation Finland; Doctoral Researcher at University of Eastern Finland
• Pekka Hätönen, District Prosecutor, Prosecution District of Western Finland
• Helen Paterson, an Associate Professor in Forensic Psychology, University of Sydney.

The webinar will also include time for a Q&A session and discussion.

Register here.

Please register here.

Coming together under the name Boundaries : Transcended is a project initiated by Alice Neikirk working with ceramicist Mojgan Habibi called The Unity Project. Participants have created over 700 tiny houses to acknowledge the resettlement of refugees in the Hunter Valley. Exhibiting alongside this project is artist and lawyer Carolyn McKay, who has explored the legal documentation and the punitive measures taken in Australia in the management of refugees into ‘detention Hotels’. Through use of AI software, Carolyn extends this antithetical relationship through text, video and neon sign installation.

Artist Statement

Dr Carolyn McKay, University of Sydney Law School

My installations reference Australian immigration case law and related reports regarding the use of hotels/motels as ‘alternative places of detention’ or the acronym, APODs. A 2023 Australian Human Rights Commission report observed that hotel/motel guests would not be aware that their holiday accommodation was also a place of immigration detention. This dichotomy between resort pleasure and oppressive surveillance underpins these artworks.

1. The APOD Solution

7 neon flex signs, dimensions variable, with looped video of Ai promptographs, 8:54 mins.

The light installation evokes the nostalgic aesthetic of retro hotel/motel neon signs, sapped of their usual bright and welcoming colours. The nostalgic aesthetic is subverted by the signs’ content – legal text from immigration case law regarding hotels/motels as ‘alternative places of detention’ or APODs. The text includes legal terminology used to delineate or ‘other’ people held on detention. The Ai promptograph images respond to the weirdness of APOD hotels/motels as destinations for fun family holidays and, simultaneously, prolonged and traumatic detention.

2. In the Palm of our Hands

Looped video, 2:18 mins with audio.

This fractured poetic text is from evidence presented in an immigration detention case documenting the onerous conditions of extended hotel/motel detention. The text is projected onto skin with glitches referencing the heavily surveilled bodies of APOD detainees.

Date & Time: 6 September to 2 November, 2024

Venue: Watt Space Gallery, University of Newcastle, 55 Elizabeth Street

People continue to suffer at the hands of the carceral system, particularly where the state seeks to further punish individuals by keeping them locked up for longer than their sentence proscribes. In this episode, LLB student, Leah Liu, talks to PhD candidate, Josh Pallas, about how his civil liberties advocacy work and experience in practice, particularly in the post-sentence detention and supervision space, have informed his academic interest in this space. Providing a valuable insight into the connections between theory and practice, this episode is a must listen for students who have an interest in applying their legal skills to the reality of rapidly evolving social justice issues within the criminal justice system.

Listen here.

We - Amy Cohen (Temple University), Stephen Young (University of Otago) and Ben Golder (UNSW) - are organising a mini-conference on the above theme to take place within the 2025 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association in Chicago, to be held May 22-25th in Chicago

Theme:

What happens when everyday actors take the law into their own hands and seek to create, or recreate, the legal worlds they inhabit? There is a long, venerable and fascinating tradition of non-legal actors seizing the means of legal imagination. These individuals and groups (sometimes even quasi-institutions) are not formally authorized to make law but they act as if they are, adopting a consciously fictive jurisdiction. 

Think, for example, of the work of peoples’ tribunals in international law - starting with the Russell Tribunal on the United State’s crimes in Vietnam in the late 1960s and through to the World Tribunal on Iraq in 2005 - that mobilise a certain (popular) understanding of international law to produce verdicts, raise popular consciousness, and critique (or maybe even redeem) international law.

Think also of the Feminist Judgments Projects (FJPs) or related exercises in critical or imaginative judgment-writing, in which legal scholars and feminist activists assume the position of judges and rewrite important appellate judicial decisions. In so doing, they seek to expose both law’s patriarchal structure but also its contingency, its hidden margin of freedom. Law, in the hands of would-be feminist judges, could always be otherwise.

Or think, in a very different political register, of those litigants (be they sovereign citizens or other individuals) who today - gathered under the sign of what mainstream legal actors pejoratively call ‘pseudolaw’ - mobilise a certain understanding of the common law and of its ancient history in order to assert a particular legal subjectivity and claim their rights. Indeed, sometimes these individuals  fashion an entire normative universe. 

These examples are neither exhaustive nor privileged instances of the phenomenon - we could add many others, from exercises of corporate self-governance (the so-called ‘Facebook Supreme Court,’ for example) to heterodox gestures of self-determination (the sovereign claims of micronations, for example).

This conference within a conference presents an opportunity to explore these phenomena, and continues discussions about ‘prefigurative legality’ (Cohen and Morgan, 2023), or other related topics. Without wishing to circumscribe those discussions, we are interested in paper proposals (which we will organise into panels) or fully-formed panels (with 3/4 papers) that address the following indicative list of topics and questions:

•How do we best think about this phenomenon of informal legality - as an instance of prefiguration, or performativity, or parody, or maybe through the lens of legal pluralism?

•What is the relationship between the informal or everyday legal claim (to rights, jurisdiction, statehood, even) and the formal structures of state or international law?

•Do these claims complete, compete with, or critique authorized law, or do they sit outside, beyond or underneath it?

•What are the political possibilities and limitations of these exercises or practices?

•What are historical examples of this phenomenon and what might those histories indicate about similar actions or actors today?

•What understanding of legal form and legal method do these practices disclose?

•What are the similarities and differences between supposedly left-wing invocations of law, and conservative mobilisations of law?

Timeline:

Send abstracts, panel proposals or thoughts to stephen.young@otago.ac.nz by 15 September 2024

We will notify people of acceptance or non-acceptance by 1 October 2024

Participants confirm participation by7 October 2024

Participants/Organisers submit panels to LSA by15 October 2024.

Please direct your questions to any of the 3 organisers at the following email addresses: b.golder@unsw.edu.au, ajcohen@temple.edu, stephen.young@otago.ac.nz. But final submission of proposals should be directed to stephen.young@otago.ac.nz

*Please note that participation in this mini-conference will “count” towards your participation limits for LSA

LSA: 22-25 May 2025

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