PhD Conference 2024: Social Science Approaches to Crime, Harm, and (In)justice
The second annual PhD Criminology conference took place from 22nd-23rd April 2024. As with last year, it was organised by PhD researchers. Daria Przybylska, a PhD candidate at the Institute’s Prisons Research Centre, organised it this year.
This year’s conference kept last year’s theme, ‘Social Science Approaches to Crime, Harm and (In)Justice’. Our speakers engaged with this theme from a variety of perspectives, from sociology to migration studies.
On 22nd-23rd April 2024, the Institute of Criminology hosted their second annual PhD-led conference.
This conference was created to provide an opportunity for PhD researchers in criminology and adjacent fields to share their work and network. Through this, they could develop confidence in their work and professional skills without the pressures of the larger criminology conferences. A key part of this is the conference being organised by PhD students. Daria Przybylska, a PhD candidate at the Institute’s Prisons Research Centre, was proud to lead this year’s organising team.
“It wasn't easy to manage alongside all of our workloads as PhD students – I was actually conducting fieldwork at the same time. So, it was great to have a responsive and hard-working team that stepped up when I needed them,” she says. “Also, we were only able to do this thanks to the encouragement and support from our department, namely our director Professor Eisner, and other academic and administrative staff at the Institute.”
This year’s conference maintained last year’s theme, ‘Social Science Approaches to Crime, Harm and (In)Justice’. Attendees’ fields of speciality included criminology, but also sociology, terrorism studies, migration studies, gender studies, queer studies, and anthropology, to name a few. Attendees also provided many different theoretical and empirical perspectives on how to research the central themes. Daria points to recurring themes of interpersonal, systemic and structural victimisation and inequality within and outside the criminal legal system. Crucially, this included speakers with lived experience.
Presenters came from within Cambridge and many other universities, in the UK and abroad. Key to attracting such a breadth of students was the low cost of this conference. Many of the larger conferences are prohibitively expensive for early-career researchers. This conference used a simple £5 registration fee, which funded bursaries for researchers with no financial support.
Attendees left the conference with new ideas both within and beyond their immediate expertise, and hopefully feeling inspired and motivated. Out of many excellent presentations, two examples that stood out to Daria were the use of Participatory Action Research methods in research with care-experienced youth, and digital sexual harassment research in the Metaverse.
“I think what the conference really highlighted was [a] need for critical perspectives, but also for a sensitive and genuine inclusion of lived experience in our work. There are so many bureaucratic barriers in criminology to doing Participatory Action Research, for example. Some of these are justified, but the new generation of researchers – with support and encouragement from more established academics – should question whether existing bureaucratic frameworks for the social sciences are really the best way of doing ethical and impactful research”.
Looking forward, Daria commented that “The Institute of Criminology has a long tradition of being a beacon in our field. That makes it ideal for the next generation of scholars to continue the legacy of pushing intellectual boundaries and finding solutions to the very real problems of crime, harm and (in)justice”.