Criminal Justice Centre » News

Recap of CJC events in the AY 2025-26!

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:08:00 GMT

The Criminal Justice Centre organised and supported a range of events throughout the 2025–26 academic year. The programme included seminars with academics from across the UK, workshops with practitioners and victim support organisations, roundtables, book launches, and events bringing together researchers and PGRs.

In May, we organised the CJC PhD Conference 2026, themed: Criminal Justice in the Spotlight: Musings on Theory and/or Practice, which brought together PhD candidates from across the UK.

Other events included a book talk with Dr Daanika Kamal on her book focusing on the legal construction of “bad” and “mad” women in Pakistan, a talk led by Dr Arushi Garg on the role of respectability in rape prosecutions in India, and a book seminar by Dr Louise Brangan on her recent book, The Fallen. CJC member Faye Claridge organised a range of collaborative sessions with Victim Support. We hosted a roundtable on critical and psychoanalytic approaches to criminal law and justice, as well as a book launch on the criminalisation of UK rap, grime and drill music, co-hosted with the Centre for Critical Legal Studies.

Stay tuned for similar events and new additions this academic year!

CJC Member to exhibit prison artwork in major British Library show.

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 12:33:00 GMT

Faye Claridge, a CJC memer, exhibit's her artwork in major shows Unearthed and We Roar.

Read more...

CJC Member Silvia Gomes releases new book with co-author Dixie Rocker- Gender, Prison and Reentry Experiences - A Matter of Time

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 15:13:00 GMT

Silvia Gomes has released her new book today (30th April) with co-author Dixie Rocker- "Gender, Prison and Reentry Experiences- A Matter of Time". This book examines the reentry journeys of incarcerated men and women about to leave Portuguese prisons.

"Gender, Prison and Reentry Experience explores the gendered reentry experiences of incarcerated men and women who are about to be released from prisons in Portugal. It reveals how men and women narrate and attribute meaning to their time in prison and how they navigate their ‘prisoner’ and ‘gendered’ identities. In doing so, this book demonstrates the importance of these identities in relation to recidivism and desistance, whilst also questioning the role incarceration has in further criminalising and obstructing individuals’ reentry process. It puts forward recommendations that aim to improve the lives of all incarcerated individuals within the current system, in addition to advocating for decarceration and prison abolition. It presents a novel contribution to the internationalisation of knowledge across multiple disciplinary subfields, namely critical reentry studies and feminist criminology, filling a gap in the current knowledge as few studies focus on prison experiences as a core aspect of understanding the reentry process. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, law, desistance studies, and those interested in gaining a unique insight into the experience of incarcerated individuals."

CJC member, Laura Lammasniemi, releases podcast episode on the concept of consent

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 14:35:00 GMT

Laura Lammasniemi has released a podcast episode as part of a wider series entitled, The Age of Consent. The podcast series aims to explore ideas of consent, where these ideas come from and how they are used, particularly within law, and the social and legal evolutions of these ideas. More information on Laura's bonus episode, can be found below. To listen to the episode, click here.

Ep6. Bonus: Reimagining good sex

What are better stories we could be telling about sex and relationships? Two years after The Age of Consent series, we reflect on previous episodes with Dr Laura Lammasniemi and how consent has come to be central to how we think about and legislate sex. We also speak to Jonny Hunt, author of 'Sex Ed for Grown-ups', about different ways we could talk about what happy, healthy, and ethical sex looks like, and chat to Dr Tina Sikka about an alternative approach to sexual justice that better captures the complex realities of sex.

CJC co-director, Henrique Carvalho, and CJC member, Anastasia Chamberlen, publish a book on the concept of punishment

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 10:55:00 GMT

The book pulls together discussions and research conducted collaboratively between Henrique and Anastasia over the past 10 years and has just been published (October 6^th) by Routledge in their Criminology and Criminal Justice Series. Details are here.

By drawing on a scholarship from law, sociology, criminology, and philosophy the book questions punishment as concept, social phenomenon and contemporary practice. It seeks to examine what are the assumptions underpinning its normalisation and legitimation in society and examines punishment’s targets, objectives and implications. The book also seeks to locate punishment and punitivity within their wider social-cultural contexts. It ultimately aims to unsettle the idea that there is something common-sensical, necessary and unavoidable about punitive justice.

As its title suggests, the book attempts to answer a series of questions, including what punishment is; who punishment’s targets and subjects are; how punishment is perpetuated and experienced; when and where punishment unfolds and finally, why we punish. It ends by considering the implications of this enquiry to understandings of punishment and broader pursuits of justice.

CJC co-director, Henrique Carvalho, and CJC member, Anastasia Chamberlen, win the Howard Journal Best Article Prize 2022

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:10:00 GMT

Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen have won the Howard Journal Best article Prize 2022 for their article titled: ‘Feeling the absence of justice: Notes on our pathological reliance on punitive justice’.

This article critically examines our relationship with justice in contemporary Western liberal settings, with a particular focus on why our pursuit of justice is intimately entangled with punitive logics. It starts by arguing that we have a predominantly pathological approach to justice, in the sense that it follows a logic that is akin to that displayed in contemporary sensibilities regarding bodily pain. We deploy Drew Leder’s concept of ‘dys-appearance’ to discuss how, in Western liberal societies, justice is primarily experienced negatively as a phenomenon; that is, we mainly become conscious of justice through the painful and episodic experience of injustice. We then explore this phenomenological quality of justice which, we argue, is linked to how the pursuit of justice in these settings predominantly takes a hostile, punitive aspect. The article concludes by exploring how this punitive impulse can be resisted, through what we term a ‘lived sense of justice’.

You can read the article here.

CJC Members organise panel on decolonisation and criminal justice at the European Society of Criminology Conference 2023

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 12:46:00 GMT

CJC co-Director Ana Aliverti co-organised (with Máximo Sozzo, Universidad Nacional de Litoral) a panel at this year's European Society of Criminology, held in Florence, Italy, on 7th September. The panel was focused on contributions from the book Decolonizing the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems (2023, Oxford University Press), which was co-edited by Aliverti and Sozzo together with CJC co-Director Henrique Carvalho and CJC member Anastasia Chamberlen. The panel, which hosted presentations from a number of the book's contributors (see list below), was highly popular, and led to engaging and thought-provoking discussions. The book, which is available Open Access online, offers a serious engagement with the complex issue of decolonisation and its urgency in the areas of criminal justice, criminology and penology.

CJC directors, Ana Aliverti and Henrique Carvalho, and member, Anastasia Chamberlen, have been awarded the prestigious Leverhulme Trust’s Research Project Grant

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 08:11:00 GMT

The project titled ‘The Vulnerable State: Appraising the Ambivalent Economies of State Power’ explores the ambivalent and shifting governance of socially marginalised groups in the criminal and administrative justice domains. It hypothesises that the state’s treatment of these groups produces a dissonance between objectives of care and control, which reveals profound dilemmas in the exercise of state power in a globalised, unequal world. It empirically examines these moral and emotional dilemmas through the everyday work of frontline officers.

Methodologically, it reconceptualises the study of the state, from the bottom up. Conceptually, it advances a new theory of the state which places moral sentiments and emotions at the heart of its analysis.

It will assess the significance of acknowledging anew a humane side of the state, the resulting contradictions experienced by those who embody state authority on the ground, and the critical potential of humanitarianism for resisting punitiveness from within.

Drawing on a range of methodologies, the project will study the moral and affective economies of state power in two key institutions (criminal and administrative justice) in the governance of social marginality at the macrosocial level (through the analysis of law and policy, operational training and visual material) and microsocial level (through the analysis of institutional decision-making and practices, and individual perceptions and experiences).

The project is made of five distinct yet interconnected subprojects tracing laws and policies, and documenting the work of a range of institutional actors and agencies (the police, the prison, the immigration court, and asylum case-work and support).

Based at �� CJC, the research team will be formed by Aliverti, Carvalho and Chamberlen, two PhD students and a research assistant. It starts in October 2022 for four years.

Welcome to Dr Maryna Utkina, Fernandes Fellow from Sumy State University Ukraine

Fri, 06 May 2022 10:34:19 GMT

The University of �� School of Law has successfully sponsored a Fernandes Fellowship devoted to academics in Ukraine. Dr Maryna Utkina is now at �� and will be with us until the end of this calendar year.

Dr Utkina is a Senior Lecturer in the Criminal Law and Procedure Department at Sumy State University. Her research is on financial regulation and criminal law enforcement of illicit proceeds from organised crime -including terrorism, money laundering and corruption. A brief explanation is below:

In my work I define the place of financial intelligence (monitoring) in the system of combating money laundering and compare foreign financial intelligence units. It serves as one of the most sovereign remedies in the system of counteracting money laundering to minimize and effectively combat organized criminality and money laundering. The high level of development of the shadow economy, corruption, ineffectiveness of regulatory and legal support, as well as duplication of functions of individual authorities have become prerequisites for the financial monitoring system formation.

The main issues I would like to research here:

- a comparative analysis of theoretic and legal framework: to compare notions or definitions of financial intelligence (monitoring); acts and codes which regulate this question;

- compare financial intelligence duties: the system of such authorities and their duties;

- research in general this activity, its levels, main points and the process at all;

- research financial intelligence in the system of corruption prevention: best practices and others.

She is based at the IAS and can be contactable at: m.utkina@yur.sumdu.edu.ua. She is very keen on getting to know colleagues while she is here.

Call for papers: Conference on the Global Travels of Knowledge on the Criminal Question (1850/1950).

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 15:07:10 GMT

|The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and the Crime and Society Program, Universidad Nacional del Litoral will be hosting an international conference on the Global Travels of Knowledge on the Criminal Question (1850/1950) on September 8-9 2022.

The conference will be hybrid and there will be simultaneous translation allowing for either English or Spanish presentations.

Paper proposals Paper proposals can be written in Spanish or English and must have a maximum length of two pages, including the title, abstract and basic academic data of the author(s) – place of work, research project in which it is inscribed, undergraduate and postgraduate training, etc.

The deadline for submitting these proposals will be May 15, 2022 and they must be sent to the email: delitoysociedad@unl.edu.ar.

The acceptance of these proposals will be communicated before May 31, 2022.

Final papers may not exceed 8000 words, including notes and references. They must be sent to the same email address by August 1, 2022 .

More details and the full call for papers can be found at this link.