Crime and Conflict Research Centre
Middlesex University
Hendon Campus
The Burroughs
London NW4 4BT
UK
Committee Room 3
27 March 2013
POLICING THE CRISIS – 35 YEARS ON
Policing the Crisis – the influential book on ‘Mugging, the State and Law and Order’ provided us with the analytical tools to interpret how a social phenomenon was objectified and transformed into a moral panic, ultimately becoming a pressing issue of the day. Its authors sought to unearth the relations of social forces that were obscured by portrayals of urban streets ‘infested with violent hoodlums’ that dominated the public eye and constructed an ideology of crisis in which the police force turned into the only bulwark against the breakdown of social order. ‘Aggro Britain’, as it was described in the 1970s, referred to a constructed social crisis centred on street crime, although the call for ‘policing the crisis’, in fact, derived from the anxiety caused by growing political, economic and racial conflict.
Thirty-five years on, with anxieties spreading across the world, the notion of ‘policing the crisis’ is still among us, although those being policed are not those who caused the present crisis.
This conference poses three main questions: What can we learn from that pioneering book of the1970sto make sense of the way social and political dissent is dealt with in our contemporary context? What are today’s forms of social control? What shape do resistances take in the face of growing coercive statesthat are ‘strong with the weak and weak with the strong’?
For more information, please contact Dr Emma Dowling () or Professor Vincenzo Ruggiero ().
“Policing the Crisis” (by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts) is about to be republished with a new Foreword, Afterword and Index.
See programme overleaf.
Programme
9.45-10.00: Welcome
Carole Adams and Vincenzo Ruggiero
10.00-10.30
Emma Dowling (Middlesex University)
‘Introduction’
10.30-11.00
Tony Jefferson
‘Policing the Crisis: Thirty-Years On’
11.00-11.30
Colin Sumner (University of Cork, Republic of Ireland)
‘Policing the Crisis: Some Notes on Its Analytic Gains’
11.30-12.00
David Miller (University of Bath)
‘Moral Panic, Class Power and Media Power’
12.00-12.30
Paul Mason (author)
‘Why It's Kicking off Everywhere: Hierarchical Force Meets Horizontally Irremovable Object’
12.30-13.00
Estelle du Boulay (Newham Monitoring Project and Network for Police Monitoring)
‘Activism and the Politics of Policing’
13.00-14.00
Lunch
14.00-14.30
Jock Young (John Jay College, New York)
14.30-15.00
Sue Mew (Middlesex University)
‘The Leveson Report, British Media and the Crisis Within’
15.00-15.30
Stafford Scott (Tottenham Rights)
15.30-16.00
Joshua Castellino (Middlesex University)
‘International Legal Responses to Uprisings in the Middle East’
16.00-17.00: Panel
Anthony Goodman, Jon Mulholland,Lucy Neville, David Porteous, Erin Sanders-McDonagh, Keir Sothcott (Middlesex University)