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This chapter provides a context for The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology. It offers an overview of the small, yet burgeoning literature dedicated to ‘criminology activism’, which includes engagement with public criminology and various brands of critical criminology, as well as zemiology or the study of social harm beyond narrow state-centric definitions of crime. Among other things, the chapter considers the role academics might play in addressing social and criminal injustice, and the new opportunities afforded to both academics and activists – including citizen journalists and media professionals – by digital technologies and social media when intervening in campaigns for justice and formal criminal legal processes. To answer the question, why now, the chapter argues we are currently in the midst of an unprecedented period of upheaval requiring action from activists and academics alike, including criminologists engaged in social scientific research operating beyond the delusions of objectivity and value-neutrality, that is, politically engaged research aiming to remedy not only the absence of meaningful state intervention in crime and harm but also expose the role of corporations and the state itself in prosecuting and perpetuating crime and harm.

Social movements are sites of knowledge production. Green criminologists are interested in activism both as an informal response to environmental harms/crimes and in their explorations of the possibility of activist green criminology. In this chapter, the author calls attention to a related issue – the significance of knowledge produced in social movements. Drawing on her study of the resistance movements against hydropower in Turkey, the author discusses how movement knowledge can contribute to green criminology in relation to the (i) complexity of harm and victimisation; (ii) politics of knowledge in identifying harm; and (iii) limits of formal processes in preventing harm. The author concludes by highlighting the importance of recognising activists as subjects who produce knowledge, in academic engagement with activism.

This chapter makes a brief incursion through a trajectory of over three decades of activism by the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of São Paulo (Núcleo de Estudos da Violência in Portuguese, NEV) in Brazil, recovering the legacy of its forms of activism and academic reflection while analysing the interfaces between violence and democracy in Brazil. The 1980s in Brazil were marked by expectations of profound political and social changes in the context of democratic transition. After 21 years of dictatorship (1964–1985), the military gradually withdrew from government, returning the state’s executive branch to civilian representatives. This was a moment of optimism for progressive groups and social movements, which had fought to dismantle the tradition of arbitrariness and violations of rights perpetrated by the state during the military dictatorship. In this context, NEV was founded as a research unit linked to the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences. Its core academic objective was to analyse and scientifically denounce the conjuncture of violence and human rights violations that remained recurrent; consequently, it demonstrated the continuity of unequal power relations, social and cultural practices that fuel authoritarianism in times considered not authoritarian.

Research on the role of women in Public Relations (PR) has seen a notable increase in recent years (Topić et al., 2019), yet exploratory studies on the subject remain limited, particularly concerning the role of women in the academic sphere of PR in Spain. Guided by the imperative to reflect on the role of PR professionals operating within the Spanish academic landscape, this chapter aims to identify and reflect on the role of women in PR academia in Spain to discover the extent to which women are leading the communication faculties where PR is taught; to identify the presence of women in the departments where communication studies take place and to determine women's leadership in national research activity. This study follows a combined approach with two dimensions, exploratory and interpretative, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques. The interpretative approach is developed using a focus group with women currently working in PR education and leading projects and institutions in the Spanish academia. Through this research, we discover the struggles and opportunities they face and identify possible solutions and ideas to improve the situation of women in academia and, specifically, in PR.

Inquiries, commissions, reviews and the promise of broader data collection about racial and gender disparities are now the reflex defensive responses from state institutions charged with grievous social harm, particularly in the UK. Recommendations from these exercises are rarely implemented. As criminologists, our ability to produce and analyse data that evidences or better illuminates social harm has long been a key offer of the discipline to activism.

How are we to respond to the very institutions activist criminologists seek to challenge immediately offering this very activity, invariably protracted and ineffectual, as a reflex response to activist challenge? This chapter explores this tension. Grounded in the work of groups struggling to end police stop and search, it considers the strategy impasse around research and data production that faces grassroots activists and their accomplice researchers. The chapter proposes new routes for collaboration and action across activist and criminologist communities that may help move past the ‘data trap’. In short, it seeks to answer: do activists need more evidence?

The debate over ‘judicial activism’ has flourished in recent decades, but the term was in fact coined 70 years ago, by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The legal academy has bemoaned the term as perpetually ill-defined, but can this be attributed to its equivocal beginnings on the pages of Fortune magazine? This chapter investigates the circumstances in which the term was produced and the early meanings given to it in scholarly work. It is argued that there was very little effort on the part of legal academics and political scientists to gather a consensus as to definition, or otherwise to treat the terminology with caution, before the term was wrested from the university cloisters and captured by the popular media in the mid-1960s.

In this chapter, the authors reflect on how the criminological agenda can move towards disrupting the boundaries that exist between the academe and sex work activism. The authors do so as academics who strive to affect social change outside of the academe, but do not attempt to offer a prescriptive ‘how to guide’. Indeed, they are themselves still grappling with the challenges of, and learning to be better at, ‘academic-activism’. The chapter begins by shining light on the activist underpinnings of the sex workers’ rights movement, before outlining some of the key scholarship in sex work studies, drawing particular attention to that which seeks to bring about social change. It then explores the utility of participatory action research (PAR) to sex work studies and reflects on how a PAR-inspired approach was used in the Beyond the Gaze research project. Here, the authors cast a critically reflexive eye over the unique realities, including the challenges, of integrating sex worker ‘peer researchers’ within the research team. The chapter concludes by considering how the criminological agenda must adapt if we truly want to bring truly want to bring about positive social change for sex workers, as well as how the current system of Higher Education ultimately stymies ‘academic-activist’ approaches to research.

The cross-pressures and tensions for engaged academics are like those of other activist professionals and advantaged allies. Academic knowledge is more useful when it is put into dialog with the knowledge and experiences of others and academics use their skills to bring new information into community discussions, to provoke discussions, and to carry knowledge between groups. Academics should listen as well as talk, recognize and respect the differences among community members, and actively attend to and seek to amplify the voices of those who are most oppressed and marginalized.