Open lecture: Stacy Banwell & Michael Fiddler University of Greenwich
Lecture
Date: Thursday 17 October 2024
Time: 13.00 – 14.30
Location: C603
The Department of Criminology receives an international visit! Stacy Banwell, Professor of Criminology and Michael Fiddler, Associate Professor of Criminology, both from the University of Greenwich, will be visiting us with a lecture each.
Stacy Banwell will give us a presentation on ‘A non-speciesist understanding of war crimes and crimes against humanity’, and Michael Fiddler's presentation will be on the theme ‘Ghost criminology: a (spirit) guide’:
‘A non-speciesist understanding of war crimes and crimes against humanity’
In 2018 Dr Melanie Joy appeared on the Ezra Klein podcast. During her conversation Joy informs listeners that “…more farmed animals are slaughtered in one week than the total number of people killed in all wars throughout human history” (Klein, 2018). Not only are these numbers alarming they also raise a broader question: are there grounds for placing the slaughter of nonhuman animals in the context of war? In her recent monograph The War against Nonhuman Animals, Prof Banwell argues that it necessary to view the killing of nonhuman animals as an act of war and believes we should extend Flynn and Hall’s (2017) proposal for a victimology of nonhuman animals to include the victimology of nonhumans during war. To achieve this study of war, Prof Banwell argues that we must recognize nonhuman animals as sentient beings and as a group who should be afforded legal personhood status. During this session we will discuss this and whether there is a need for a Nonspeciesist/more-than-human Criminology.
Ghost Criminology: an exploration of the discipline’s ‘spectral turn’
The inequalities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial injustice brought to vivid focus by footage of lethal state violence and the fires that have scoured continents speak to traumas of the past and future being inflicted upon the living in the present. Drawing upon recent criminological scholarship examining spectrality, as well as Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, this presentation sets out a framework to explore these harms. This new sub-discipline of ‘ghost criminology’ is a means to recognise the harms that have been inflicted in the past and trace the contours of their lingering presence. Given the discipline’s spectral turn, we can begin to capture those figures, groups and concepts that have been rendered invisible, as well as attend to harms that have persistent afterlives. In this, it is vital that we also attend to the discipline’s troubling and troubled past. Criminology continues to be haunted by its complicity in colonialist practice, scientific racism and eugenics. The present itself also demands radical praxis to ensure justice in the intersecting crises of racial injustice, structural imbalance and climate catastrophe. We conclude, then, by conjuring ghosts of the future. In attending to these, we must shape the ‘not yet’. We must imagine a state that does not see its most vulnerable members ‘let die’ through inaction or subject to the language and rituals of violence. A ‘ghost criminology’ provides a means of listening to the voices of the discipline’s dead, as well as the ghosts of its future.
Last updated: October 16, 2024
Source: Department of Criminology