Written by Nasrul Ismail
We held our second Zemiology Conference at Wills Memorial Building, Bristol on 11th December 2023. Dr Jo Large, who pioneered this event since 2022, convened the conference. It offered an excellent programme with a range of panels featuring 19 speakers related to the themes of: immigration and detention; researching powerful people and corporations; drugs, women and violence; and using creative methods to research crime and harm. Additionally, seven of our BSc Criminology students presented their posters based on their current dissertation topics.
Dr Sanja Milivojevic opened the conference via her keynote address on the role of criminologists in designing and developing digital futures. She challenged the delegates—staff members and students—to think on why we should care about technology such as Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing, and why we should be active participants in technology co-creation and co-design.
Our first panel was on the theme of immigration, detention, harm and ethics. Exploring allyship and activism in researching participants who experienced suffering and marginality, Dr Dan Godshaw explained the ethical conundrums he faced when conducting his research on the harms of immigration detention in the UK. Amy Sage subsequently delivered her presentation on the range of harms that stem from the social exclusion of individuals with a criminal record in England and Wales, which was followed by Dr Amanda Schmid-Scott’s presentation on the problematic aspect of Home Office reporting on who utilises their reporting centres for purposes of targeting asylum seekers as potential deportees, meaning that each time an individual attends their reporting appointment, they face possible detainment and removal.
Researching powerful people and powerful corporations was the second panel of the day. Professor Gary Fooks commenced this panel by examining how different stakeholders at the UK’s largest businesses—board executives, shareholders and workers—fared during and after the peak of the pandemic. Then, Dr Nasrul Ismail reflected on his experience of conducting interviews with 129 policy elites, pre- and post-pandemic, through his three prison health projects between 2016 and 2023. This panel was concluded by Dr Natasha Mulvihill on her newly commenced project, funded by the European Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on sexual offending by professionals.
Our penultimate panel was on international research, focusing on drugs, women and violence. Dr Gernot Klantschnig provided us with an update on his Cannabis Africana Project, which was followed by Catalina Ortuzar Madrid’s presentation that explored the labour experiences of Chilean women in the formal and informal labour market, as well as their relationship, similarities and differences to the illegal drug market. Dr Rachelle Chadwick ended this panel presentation by exploring the phenomenon ‘reproductive harm’, especially in relation to childbirth.
The panel on using creative methods to research crime and harm concluded the theme panel at this conference. From Dr Jade Levell’s music elicitation as an intervention tool with criminalised young men in Albania and Jo Higson’s data collection involving domestic abuse survivors through the running of a book club, to Mónica Sánchez Hernández’s Comic drawing with male domestic violence perpetrators in Mexican prisons and Evanthia Triantafyllidou on body mapping to understand the healing experiences of women affected by intersecting oppressions and trauma, these presentations collectively illustrated the importance of sensory and participatory research methods to provide rich and multimodal aspects in life story research.
Our Zemiology Conference ended with a drinks reception and prize giving ceremony where we awarded the prize for ‘Best Poster’ kindly sponsored by Bristol University Press.
Our overall poster presentation winner was:
- Molly Smith, BSc Criminology, on using prisoner experience and knowledge as a method of safeguarding prison policy (winner of the Bristol University Press ‘Best Poster’ Prize)
We had a fantastic group of posters from our BSc Criminology students. Congratulations and runner up prizes were awarded to:
- Freya Huson, on how stigma is used to exclude people who inject drugs in the city of Bristol
- Sophie Stenning, on the media representation of gender when discussing domestic abuse within the UK
- Jessica Read, on socio-legal responses to homosexuality in former colonies
- Jessica Brown, on the colonial legacies in radical feminist abolitionist and anti-sex work
- James Walling, on how contemporary advertising contributes to the normalisation of gambling within football.
We also had three excellent poster presentations from post-graduate students from School for Policy Studies.
- Catalina Ortuzar Madrid, on Labour market experiences of women and their involvement in the drug economy in Chile
- Amy Sage, on The Harms of Exclusion: A Critical Analysis of Collateral Consequences of a Criminal Conviction
- Sharon Martin, on using songwriting to explore women’s experiences of gambling related harms.
Unanimously, all delegates found that the conference helped them to understand research in practice, enabled them to think of future dissertation topics and reinforced that they were part of the Bristol Criminology community.
We look forward to hosting our third staff and student Zemiology Conference in December 2024, with another exciting line-up of speakers and activities. Watch this space!
