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This chapter analyses the degree to which the UK Higher Education (UKHE) Sector can offer spaces for students to critically reflect on topics relevant to activist criminology such as zemiology or abolitionism as opposed to constructing the criminal justice system (CJS) as a natural solution for crimes and social harms. This chapter argues for the importance of this topic due to deepening institutional links between universities and criminal justice agencies in the name of professionalisation for the latter (Hallenberg & Cockroft, 2017). This chapter proposes that to avoid criminology curricula merely reproducing the priorities and solutions of the CJS, it should turn to the liberatory pedagogy of Paolo Freire (1996). This includes teaching practices to encourage recognition of social movements and resistance against harms of states, corporations, or the CJS as legitimate foci in the criminology curriculum.

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.

This study aims to investigate the clamour by the people of Plateau State, Nigeria, for more licences to bear firearms for self-defence because of the continuous failure of the Nigerian State to defend them against the Fulani herders’ aggression. More guns less crime deterrence theory served as the framework of analysis, which posits that because criminals are rational beings, they will choose not to attack when they know many people have legitimate firearms.

Data were collected from four purposefully selected local government areas of the state. This study’s sample size was 400. Therefore, 400 copies of the Google Forms questionnaire were administered. In addition, seven key informant interviews and nine focus group discussions were also conducted.

This research results showed the following: while self-defence and issuance of more licenses were supported by 84.8% and 85.0% of respondents, respectively, they also argued that the insurgency would likely end if more people carried legally acquired firearms. Again, the study showed a positive correlation between the government’s failure in security and the demand for self-defence exercises against the Fulani herdsmen’s insurgency, this study recommends more licensed firearms for the people of Plateau State.

This study recommends more licenced firearms for the people of Plateau State.

Corruption perception is essential to study because it can shape people’s attitudes toward the government. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to address this key question: what factors are associated with a non-expert’s judgment of whether Canada is corrupt?

This study uses the World Value Survey conducted in Canada in October 2020. This survey is based on a nationally representative sample of a cross-section of adult Canadian residents, including Canadian citizens and permanent residents and those who are neither Canadian citizens nor permanent residents.

Based on this study, some conclusions can be made. First, people accessing corruption news from the traditional news media are less likely than those receiving information from the new media to perceive the state (in this case, Canada) as corrupt. Second, people who have less confidence in public institutions are more likely to perceive a country as corrupt. Third, people who participate in electoral and non-electoral forms of political participation are more likely to perceive the state and its public officials as corrupt. Fourth, regardless of which political party is in power, individuals who lean right politically are more likely than those on the left to perceive the state as corrupt. Finally, immigrants are less likely than those born in Canada to perceive the state as corrupt. This work enriches the literature on the substantive understanding of the factors associated with corruption perception.

Studies investigating factors associated with public perception of corruption tend to focus on developing countries. The current study contributes to filling this gap in knowledge by examining correlates of corruption perception in Canada. As a result, this study contributes to the literature on factors associated with corruption perception, especially in the developed country context.

Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level arrangements are reflected in micro-level processes. This work uses radical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of “criminalized subjectivity” among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white university in the Midwest. I use semistructured interviews to explore the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction and how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. Findings demonstrate that Black university students are keenly aware of this particular stigma and its consequences in increasingly complex ways from the time they are school-aged children. They were aware of this stigma as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of themselves; said internalization was thwarted through strong self-concept and racial socialization. This increasingly complex awareness is also informed by an intersectional lens for some interviewees. I argue not only that the concept of stigma must be explicitly placed within these larger systems but also that understanding and identity-building are both rooted in ever-evolving processes of interaction and meaning-making. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and criminology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.

Grassroots activists leverage innovative, justice-oriented strategies to address wide-scale problems like climate change, life-threatening poverty, threats to Indigenous land rights, and racialised incarceration while simultaneously navigating highly localised issues like food insecurity. In the United States, urban activists are associated with large-scale demonstrations and social justice campaigns, yet rural community leaders have been campaigning against inequality and racism for decades, rarely receiving similar nuanced attention. Beyond differences in awareness and recognition, rural and urban activism generally operate independently from one another. However, more robust alliances across community types are needed more than ever to tackle today’s most pressing social problems. In this chapter, the authors draw on their scholarship on urban and rural activism to show that both varieties share common features, including a critical, political, and sociological consciousness with a core mission of social justice through community mobilisation. From this, the authors discuss common differences between urban and rural activism, reflect on the role of activist scholars in supporting (more unified) struggles for justice, and address some critical issues regarding academics who wish to study or work with activists and social movements.

This paper aims to analyze what Samarco and Brazilian magazines speak and say about Mariana’s environmental crime. Discover their doxa in this subject. Interpret the speakings, sayings and doxas through the theories of the treadmills of production, crime and law.

It is a qualitative and documental research and a narrative analysis. Regarding the documents: 45 were from public authorities, 14 from Samarco Mineração S.A. and 73 from Brazilian magazines. Theoretically, the authors resorted to Bourdieusian sociology (speaking, saying and doxa) and the treadmills of production, crime and law theories.

Samarco: speaking – mission statements; saying – detailed information and economic and financial concerns; doxa – assistance discourse. Brazilian magazines: speaking – external agents; saying – agreements; doxa – attribution, aggravations, historical facts, impacts and protests.

The absence of discussions that addressed this fatality, with its respective consequences, from an agenda that exposed and denounced how it exacerbated race, class and gender inequalities.

Regarding Mariana’s environmental crime: Samarco Mineração S.A. speaks and says through the treadmill of production theory and supports its doxa through the treadmill of crime theory, and Brazilian magazines speak and say through the treadmill of law theory and support their doxa through the treadmill of crime theory.

To provoke reflections on the relationship between the mining companies and the communities where they settle to develop their productive activities.

Concerning environmental crime in perspective, submit it to a theoretical interpretation based on sociological references, approach it in a debate linked to environmental criminology, and describe it through narratives exposed by the guilty company and by Brazilian magazines with high circulation.