1st Edition

Criminological Connections, Directions, Horizons Essays in Honour of Nigel South

Edited By Eamonn Carrabine, Anna Di Ronco Copyright 2025
    280 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This timely book presents a carefully curated selection of essays to celebrate the career of Nigel South, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Sociology and Criminology of the University of Essex, and one of the leading figures in his field.

    Through his long career, still ongoing and flourishing, Nigel has contributed knowledge in many areas of criminological scholarship and challenged the confines of the discipline, opening up new directions for thinking and debate. In this volume, Nigel’s close colleagues and friends celebrate his exceptional career through essays that draw on, or have been inspired by, his earlier or most recent work. Spanning across the areas of policing, drugs, green, southern, and sensory criminology, these essays offer cutting-edge research and fresh conceptual insights honouring the work of an outstanding criminologist, colleague, friend, and human being.

    This volume will be of pivotal interest to students, scholars and academics in the fields of sociology and criminology, as well as those with an interest in these areas more generally.

    'Introduction. Introduction: Celebrating the Career of Nigel South.  1. Policing for Profit: Nigel’s Contribution to the Study of Private Policing and Security.  2. Drug Use Normalization and Surrealism.  3. Doing Drug Market Research Critically Through a Lens of Assumed Differentiation: ‘Seeing’ the ‘Invisible’.  4. Unveiling Parallels: Exploring the Blurred Boundary Between Legality and Illegality.  5. Ecocidal Tendencies of Late Capitalism.  6. Criminology, Food Politics and Controversial Technologies.  7. Criminology’s Animal Turn.  8. Anthropocentrism, Speciesism and Speciecide.  9. Empathy Without Borders: Decolonial Criminology, Western Scholars, and Peer Methodology.  10. Scarcity, Conflict and Environmental Crime.  11. Ecologically Induced Genocide: A New Synthesis.  12. Conveying Environmental Harms Through Music: Some Directions for Green-cultural Criminology.  13. “Life-stage Dissolution” (“Adultification” and “Infantilization”) and the Right to Repair: Implications for Fixing this World.  14. This Feels Bad: Climate Change, Affect, and Sensory Criminology.  15. Grave Matters: Ghost Criminology, Necropolitics and the Anthropocene.  Afterword. Afterword: Connections, Directions, Horizons: Afterthoughts and Thank Yous.  

    Biography

    Eamonn Carrabine is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. His books include Crime in Modern Britain (co-authored, 2002); Power, Discourse and Resistance: A Genealogy of the Strangeways Prison Riot (2004); Crime, Culture and the Media (2008); and Crime and Social Theory (2017). He has published widely on media criminology, the sociology of punishment and cultural theory. The textbook he co-authors with colleagues from the University of Essex, Criminology: A Sociological Introduction, is now in its fourth edition. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief on the British Journal of Criminology and is writing a book on the Iconography of Punishment.

    Anna Di Ronco is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Sociology Department of the University of Essex and Director for its Centre for Criminology. Her research critically addresses dynamics of exclusion and penalisation in the public space, as well as performative, visual and mediated practices of resistance. Her books include Policing Environmental Protest: Power and Resistance in Pandemic Times (2023), Criminology: A Sociological Introduction (co-authored; 2020, 4th ed.), Harm and Disorder in the Urban Space: Social Control, Sense and Sensibility (co-edited; 2021) and Medical Misinformation and Social Harm in Non-Science Based Health Practices: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (co-edited; 2020).

    “This book, while celebrating the remarkable career of Dr Nigel South, one of the key thinkers in contemporary criminology, is no ordinary Festschrift. For, given Dr South’s long career at the cutting-edge of debates within criminology, it features a series of fascinating essays that are both informative, in terms of the core issues within policing, drugs research, green, southern, and sensory criminology, and conceptually at the forefront of the discipline.  By focusing on Dr South's contributions, the collection is also illustrative of the importance of the biographical turn within criminology – the need to place individual thinkers within current debates and the development of the discipline.”

    -Prof Jayne MooneyJohn Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

    This book is a wonderful tribute to the continuing influence of Nigel South on the development of green criminology. It shows him to be a scholar-activist of the highest magnitude. I am fortunate indeed to count him as a colleague.

    -Piers BeirneProfessor Emeritus of Sociology and Legal Studies, University of Southern Maine.

    “This is an inspiring collection of essays celebrating the path breaking intellectual trajectory of Nigel South. The nature of festschrifts implies some backward-looking review of past achievements. The exceptional feature of this volume, reflecting the pioneering character of Nigel South’s work over several decades and numerous areas of criminology, is that its contributions are vital for understanding the futures of not just criminal justice but the world itself. Nigel South has been the foundational research, policy, and analytic voice in critical approaches to policing, drug markets, international law enforcement and green criminology. This book’s editors have assembled an impressive array of diverse and distinguished authors. The result is not only a wonderful celebration of Nigel South. It is a vital contribution to understanding the crises facing the globe.”

    -Robert ReinerEmeritus Professor of Criminology, London School of Economics.

    “This exceptional collection of essays is the ideal tribute to Nigel’s pioneering scholarship, intellectual generosity and distinguished contributions to criminology spanning over four decades. The book exemplifies the best of the socially engaged criminological tradition and will no doubt inspire scholars and practitioners across the global North and South for years to come.”

    -Professor Maggy LeeDepartment of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.