19 research outputs found
Entering the Maze: space, time and exclusion in an abandoned Northern Ireland prison
No full textThis article is an autoethnographic account of the authors’ trespassing in the abandoned Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. For three decades before its closure in 2000, the Maze was the site of intense political struggle. The ruins of the Maze – a space once built to let no one out that now allows no one in – exist now in a state of limbo, between the conflicting narratives of the prison’s troubled past, and an uncertain future. We present a brief historical account of the Maze, and explain our unconventional choice of ‘research method’, before introducing Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia. We suggest that the Maze is an archetypally heterotopic space and our experience of exploring the prison can equally be described as suc
Ghost Criminology: The Afterlife of Crime and Punishment
No full textThe haunting effects of crime, violence, and death in our history, memory, and media spaces
From Abu Ghraib and Holocaust death camps to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and slave plantations, spaces where violent crimes have occurred can often become forever changed, or “haunted,” in the public imagination. In this volume, Michael Fiddler, Travis Linnemann, and Theo Kindynis bring together an interdisciplinary group of distinguished scholars to study this phenomenon, exploring the origins, theory, and methodology of ghost criminology.
Featuring Jeff Ferrell, Michelle Brown, Eamon Carrabine, and other prominent scholars, Ghost Criminology takes us inside spaces where the worst crimes have imprinted themselves on our history, memory, and media spaces. Contributors explore a wide range of these hauntological topics from a criminological perspective, including the excavation of graffiti in the London underground, the phantom of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA, during the 2017 riots, and the ghostly evidentiary traces of crime in motel rooms.
Ultimately, Fiddler, Kindynis, and Linnemann offer ghost criminology as another way of seeing, and better understanding, the lingering impact of violence, oppression, and history in today’s world. Ghost Criminology curates cutting-edge research to break exciting new terrain
Book review: Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City
No full text© The Author(s) 2017. This is an author produced version of a review uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self- archiving policy
Ripping up the map: Criminology and cartography reconsidered
No full textCriminologists have long been interested in mapping crime, yet their use and understanding of maps remain superficial and uncritical. This article traces crime mapping’s historical development before considering the emergence of ‘critical cartography’ and exploring its implications for criminology. Criminologists are urged to interrogate conventional crime maps, and to investigate the criminological implications of emergent digital mapping technologies. Maps and map making afford a host of innovative methodologies that criminologists have yet to take advantage of, and some tentative suggestions are made as to how criminologists might utilize cartographic methods in order to generate unique empirical insights. Finally, the article considers how criminologists might harness maps’ communicative power to better engage with the public and to promote social justice
Urban Exploration as Deviant Leisure
No full textRecreational trespass or ‘urban exploration’ is the practice of researching, gaining access to and documenting forbidden, forgotten or otherwise off-limits places, including abandoned buildings, high-rise construction sites and infrastructure systems. Over the past two decades a global subculture has coalesced around this activity. More recently, however, the practice has begun to transform along divergent lines. As numerous corporations have sought to cash in on what they see as the latest edgy urban branding opportunity in an attempt to market their products to young urban consumers, new and increasingly image-centric, spectacular and conformative variants of the practice have emerged. Based on ongoing (auto)ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with urban explorers, this chapter considers how processes of commodification and corporate sponsorship, in conjunction with the emergence of new social media platforms, have drastically altered both the firsthand experience of the practice and the dynamic of the subculture more generally. The chapter suggests that urban exploration has been thoroughly assimilated into a dominant neoliberal culture of spectacular consumption, exhibiting the kinds of individualistic, competitive and risk-taking behaviours valued within the current social conjuncture, and asks: to what extent, if any, can urban explorers recuperate the practice’s transgressive potential? It is my hope that the potential of urban exploration, and of other similar practices that engage with urban spaces in novel and informal ways, as genuinely prosocial forms of leisure can be realised. However, we must first recognise and understand the myriad harms associated with commodified leisure more broadly
Urban exploration: From subterranea to spectacle
No full textRecreational trespass or ‘urban exploration’ (UE) is the practice of researching, gaining access to and documenting forbidden, forgotten or otherwise off-limits places, including abandoned buildings, construction sites and infrastructure systems. Over the past two decades, a global subculture has coalesced around this activity. More recently, however, the practice has begun to transform along divergent lines. The aims of the present article are three-fold: first, to bring UE and its emergent variants to the attention of a criminological audience; second, to interrogate increasingly spectacular visual representations of UE and attendant processes of commodification; and third, to introduce the rhizome as a way of thinking about urban social formations, their development and appropriation
Individually fair optimal decision trees: Using a dynamic programming approach
No full textIn this paper, we tackle the problem of creating decision trees that are both optimal and individually fair. While decision trees are popular due to their interpretability, achieving optimality can be difficult. Existing approaches either lack scalability or fail to consider individual fairness. To address this, we define individual fairness as a separable optimization task by analyzing the fairness gained and lost within a sub-tree. Using the Streed framework, we implement an algorithm that constructs optimal decision trees with the lowest misclassification score and individual fairness value above a certain threshold. Our algorithm has been tested on various datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability. This research is a significant step towards creating fair decision trees that are optimal, fair, and scalable.CSE3000 Research ProjectComputer Science and Engineerin
Destroyed Records
No full textAbstract:
Destroying records, documents and evidence is a commonly-used bureaucratic technique for mitigating the potential dangers of their dissemination. This occurs where evidentiary material contains, for instance, biohazardous substances such as blood, or contaminants such as asbestos, or other illicit ingredients, such as narcotics. Smuggled wildlife is frequently euthanised. Legal and administrative records will be retained for a prescribed period, after which they may be destroyed. Certain public records, in order to preserve secrecy or confidentiality, may be redacted, cancelled or deleted. This chapter discloses the range of ways that criminal evidence and records are destroyed or damaged as legitimate state practices. What remains of these destructive practices are ghostly apparitions, spectres of crime, and these generate new spectacles and new fears.
This chapter understands these destructive state practices as acts that invoke ghosts. These ghosts are the traces of dead records, documents and evidence, things that were killed in the administration of justice
Excavating ghosts: Urban exploration as graffiti archaeology
No full textBased on several years of near-nightly excursions into London's disused, non-public, forgotten, subterranean and infrastructural spaces, this article considers the significance of discovering years-or even decades-old surviving traces of graffiti ('ghosts', in graffiti parlance) in situ. The article also draws on extensive ethnographic research into London's graffiti subculture, as well as in-depth semi-structured interviews with several generations of graffiti writers. The article proceeds in four parts. The first part reflects on three sources of methodological inspiration: unauthorised urban exploration and documentation; more-or-less formal archaeological studies of graffiti; and 'ghost ethnography', an emergent methodological orientation which places an emphasis on absence and the interpretation of material and atmospheric traces. The second part of the article considers recent theoretical work associated with the 'spectral turn'. Here, ghosts and haunting provide useful conceptual metaphors for thinking about lingering material and atmospheric traces of the past. The third part of the article offers some methodological caveats and reflections. The fourth and final part of the article seeks to connect theory and method, and asks what significance can be drawn from unauthorised encounters with graffiti 'ghosts'
Bomb alert: Graffiti writing and urban space in London
No full textBased on three years of ethnographic research undertaken in London amongst a loose network of what British Transport Police term ‘serious graffiti vandals’, this article considers how we might conceive theoretically of the interrelationships between graffiti writing, urban space and social control. The article proceeds in two parts. By way of introduction, the first half of the article delineates some of the major subcultural elements that comprise the day-to-day practice of graffiti writing as it exists in present-day London. The second half of the article engages the theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre. It is suggested that graffiti can be understood as simultaneously disrupting authoritative spatial orderings, whilst superimposing its own alternative social geography onto the city
