Abstract
This virtual special issue of The British Journal of Criminology has been prepared to coincide with the 2022 annual conference of the British Society of Criminology, hosted by the Department of Sociology and the Centre for Criminology at the University of Surrey. The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Reimagining Criminological Futures: New Criminologies in a Changing World’, and it is our hope that the first in-person conference of the Society in three years will offer delegates the opportunity to consider how criminology can respond to an ever wider and complex set of challenges at a time of rapid social and economic change.
As it was probably inevitable in light of current events, discussions leading to the creation of this special issue largely revolved around the idea of crisis. In thinking about how criminological research has explored and interrogated recent ruptures and their impact on the world at large and on disadvantaged and marginalised constituencies, we intentionally and purposefully looked outward rather than inward, and the selection of papers you will find below reflects this approach. Brexit does not make an appearance; the Black Lives Matter movement, Covid-19 and the refugee crisis do. We took the last word of the theme literally and made an effort to include papers that study contexts rarely featured in criminological debates, and explore the challenges faced by criminological theory when applied to countries from the Global South.
Most of the papers we selected are fairly recent; somewhat counterintuitively, the two oldest focus on technology. The leap from studying the introduction of a computerised management information system to talking about the challenges and opportunities for criminology in the time of Big Data shows the strength and relevance of a discipline that has always strived to make sense of what is happening in the world around us in a critical and socially conscious manner. We hope that the conversations to be had at this year’s conference will help the discipline and all of us to continue this journey.