CALL FOR PAPERS
Experiences of crime are often shadowed by spectral forces – ghostly remnants of past injustices, lingering traumas, and unresolved conflicts.
Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology and Mark Fisher’s reinterpretation of the concept as a cultural condition of late capitalism, this conference invites scholars to explore the intersections of criminology and hauntology, engaging with themes of harm, justice, punishment, and deviance through the lens of spectrality, temporalities, and the uncanny.
We also seek contributions that interrogate the ghosts that haunt contemporary and future criminological thought and practice, in particular, those that critique the neoliberal consensus that Fisher argues has trapped society in a perpetual present, devoid of the possibility of a different future.
We encourage papers that push the boundaries of the application of hauntology, including but not limited to:
• Haunted institutions: prisons, asylums, and sites of past violence
• Commodified horrors: Sites of dark tourism
• Progress, pandemics and permacrises
• Memory, trauma, and victimisation
• Political nostalgia and new approaches
• Environmental crisis and the loss of futures
• Echoes of the past: cultural and aesthetic homogeneity
• Urban hauntings: crime, gentrification, and spectral spaces
• Surveillance, spectrality, and the digital panopticon
• Dystopian and utopian imagined futures
• Ghosts of punishment: the lingering effects of past penal practices
• Colonial hauntings and historical injustices in legal and criminological frameworks
• Folklore, horror, and criminological narratives
• Life lived and remembered online
• Scholarly stagnation: Lost futures of criminology in neoliberal academia
• New criminologies and radical approaches.
• Haunted institutions: prisons, asylums, and sites of past violence
• Commodified horrors: Sites of dark tourism
• Progress, pandemics and permacrises
• Memory, trauma, and victimisation
• Political nostalgia and new approaches
• Environmental crisis and the loss of futures
• Echoes of the past: cultural and aesthetic homogeneity
• Urban hauntings: crime, gentrification, and spectral spaces
• Surveillance, spectrality, and the digital panopticon
• Dystopian and utopian imagined futures
• Ghosts of punishment: the lingering effects of past penal practices
• Colonial hauntings and historical injustices in legal and criminological frameworks
• Folklore, horror, and criminological narratives
• Life lived and remembered online
• Scholarly stagnation: Lost futures of criminology in neoliberal academia
• New criminologies and radical approaches.
Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words, accompanied by a short biography (100 words). Please submit proposals by Thursday 17 April 2025 to sian.lewis@plymouth.ac.uk.
