Contemporary societies in motion

Scientific Committee

The Scientific Committee is the backbone of the conference. Its members review the submitted abstracts, assist in the design of the programme, in selecting keynotes, discussants, and chairs, and in promoting the conference.

The European Society of Criminology (ESC) Working Group on Qualitative Research Methodologies and Epistemologies (WG-QRME) 

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NCUA), Department of Communication
and Media Studies

The National Centre for Social Research (EKKE)

Center for the Study of Crime (CSC)

Inquiries about abstracts and proposed sessions can be directed to the organizing committee of the conference via email: athensconf2021@gmail.com

Keynotes

On this page, you can find the presenting keynotes as well as an introduction to their presentations.

Emeritus Professor, Department of Sociology, LSE

Paul Rock studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford and is now Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.  He has been a visiting scholar at the Ministry of the Solicitor General of Canada and a visiting professor at a number of universities in North America, including Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.  Most recently, he has been a recurrent visiting professor at the University of Macau.  He has also been a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and the Regulatory Institutions Network at the Australian National University.  He is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Arts.  His published work has focused chiefly on the evolution of criminal justice policies in Canada and England and Wales, particularly for victims of crime, and on developments in criminological theory. His latest publications have been the first two volumes of the official history of criminal justice in England and Wales in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Rita Faria, Assistant Professor School of Criminology of the Law Faculty, University of Porto

Rita Faria (rfaria@direito.up.pt) is currently Assistant Professor of Criminology at the School of Criminology – Faculty of Law of the University of Porto, and a founding member of the International Research Center on Crime, Justice, and Security.

She holds a Ph.D. in Criminology, a Master in Sociology, and a Degree in Law. She has been teaching at the Undergraduate and Master in Criminology, as well in Doctoral Schools and research seminars in other European universities, such as the University of Ghent (Belgium) or Erasmus University (The Netherlands).

Rita is co-chair of the European Society of Criminology Working Group on Qualitative Research Methodologies and Epistemologies (WG-QRME), and a board member of the European working group on Organizational Crime (EUROC). Her research interests include occupational, white-collar crime, and elite crime, as well as environmental crime. In her research, she has been specializing in the use of qualitative methods in Criminology. Most of all, she has been studying research misconduct for the last 12 years and has published and presented widely on the topic.

She is currently a member of the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Law of the University of Porto, as well as a member of the Ethics and Responsible Conduct Committee of i3S, a Portuguese conglomerate on research and innovation in the health system, and of the Ethics Committee of Barcelona’s Guardia Urbana.

International publications include:

Petintseva, O., Faria. R. & Eski, Y. (2019). Interviewing Elites, Experts and the Powerful in Criminology. London: Plagrave Macmillan

Borges, G. & Faria, R. (2019). “Breathing under water: gendering the violence against refugee women”. In: Milica S. Boscovic (Ed.), Globalization and its impact on violence against vulnerable groups. Pennsylvania: IGI Global. ISBN: 978522596271

Faria, R. & Eski, Y. (2019). Een wolf onder de wolven. Ethiek en Ethische Commissies in criminologisch onderzoek naar ‘the pwoerful’. Tijdschrift over Cultuur & Criminaliteit, 8(3), 43-58

Faria, R. (2018). Research misconduct as white-collar crime: a criminological approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-319-73435-4

Derrick, G.E., Faria, R., Benneworth, P., Budtz-Petersen, D., Sivertsen, G. (2018). Towards characterising negative impact: Introducing Grimpact. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators. CWTS/Leiden University. https://hdl.handle.net/1887/64521

Faria, R. (2015). Scientific misconduct: how organizational culture plays its part. Tijdschrift over Cultuur & Criminaliteit, 5(1), 38-54

Cruz, J. N., Faria, R., Leite, A. L., & Sousa, P. (2015). How does law enforcement respond to entrepreneurial white-collar crime? Some insights from Portugal. In W. Huisman, J. v. Erp, G. V. Walle & J. Beckers (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime in Europe (pp. 512-530). London: Routledge.

Faria, R. (2014). Science under pressure. Problematic behaviours and social harms. Revista Crítica Penal y Poder(7), 64-84.

Dr. Michael Mills: Lecturer in Criminology, Social Policy, Sociology, and Social Research, University of Kent

Michael Mills has been working as a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research since 2016, teaching across all stages of the undergraduate criminology programmes and on the MA in Criminology. He is also the Common Studies Sessions Co-ordinator for the MA in Criminology programme.

Michael studied for an undergraduate degree in Criminology and Sociology at Kent, winning the School’s Canterbury Campus Prize for Best Criminology Dissertation. He continued his studies at Kent and received a distinction for a Masters in Methods of Social Research and completed a Ph.D. in Criminology that focused on the American phenomenon of ‘Doomsday’ prepping (titled ‘Witness to the American Apocalypse? A Study of 21st Century ‘Doomsday’ Prepping’).

Research interests

Michael’s research interests centre on American ‘Doomsday’ prepping. Prepping is a primarily American practice undertaken by individuals and small groups who develop survival skills and store food, water, and weapons for the purpose of surviving future crisis or social collapse.

His work engages with a lack of scholarly knowledge on prepping, which has resulted in this phenomenon being understood through media-driven stereotypes and theories of older survivalist activity. Such understandings suggest that prepping is apocalyptic, millenarian, politically-extreme, and typically emerges from anti-Semitic, anti-government, radical religious, and White Supremacist movements on the outermost fringes of American culture. His work offers a counter to this narrative, demonstrating that in many ways – including politically – prepping has evolved to become a much more mainstream phenomenon than many outsiders imagine. The research has involved ethnographic and survey-based studies involving hundreds of American preppers, and attendance at prominent prepping conventions, and has been ongoing since 2014.

Outside of Michael’s work on prepping, his research interests more broadly address themes around cultural criminology, political extremism, American political and right-wing culture, late modernity, risk, and graffiti writing.

Publications

Articles

Mills, M. and Fleetwood, J. (2020) “Prepping and Verstehen – A Narrative Criminological Perspective”, Tijdschrift over Cultuur en Criminaliteit. Eleven International Publishing. doi: 10.5553/TCC/221195072019009003003.

Mills, M. (2019) “Preparing for the unknown… unknowns: ‘doomsday’ prepping and disaster risk anxiety in the United States”, Journal of Risk Research. Taylor & Francis, pp. 1267-1279. doi: 10.1080/13669877.2018.1466825.

Source: https://www.kent.ac.uk/social-policy-sociology-social-research/people/1390/www.kent.ac.uk/social-policy-sociology-social-research/people/1390/mills-michael

Plenary sessions with:

Nicolas Demertzis, Professor, Sociology Department, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, President, Greek National Center for Social Research

Nicolas Demertzis is a Professor in Political Sociology and Communication, at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Director of the National Centre for Social Research.

From 2004 until 2010 he was a member of the steering committee of the Cyprus University of Technology (Lemesos), Founder and Head of the Department of Communication and Internet Studies, and Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies.

From May 2010 until May 2013 he was President of the States Scholarship Foundation, Greece.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (1980) and a Ph.D. in Political Sociology from Lund University, Sweden (1986).

His major works are: “Cultural Theory and Political Culture. New Directions and Proposals” (Lund, 1985), “Culture, Modernity, Political Culture”, (Athens, 1989), co-authored with Thanos Lipowatz, “Essay on Ideology. A Dialogue between Social Theory and Psychoanalysis”, (Athens, 1994), “Local Publicity and the Press in Greece”, (Athens, 1996), “The Nationalist Discourse. Ambivalent Semantic Field and Contemporary Tendencies”, (Athens, 1996), “Emotions in Politics: The Affect Dimension in Political Tension” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

His current research interests focus on the realms of political sociology, political communication, and the sociology of emotions.

Recent Work:

The Political Sociology of Emotions: Essays on Trauma and Ressentiment
Author: Nicolas Demertzis
Publisher: Routledge, 2020, 266 pages
ISBN 9780815380733

Covid-19 as cultural trauma
Authors: Nicolas Demertzis and Ron Eyerman
Publisher: American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2020) 8:428–450
Links: Article;

Πηγή: https://nicolasdemertzis.com/

Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Social Research in Mass Media at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

George Pleios Ph.D. is Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Social Research in Mass Media at the National and Kapodistrian University Athens (NKUA). He studied Sociology (BA and MA) in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy, at the University of Sofia “Kliment Ohridski”. At the same University, he completed in 1987 his doctoral studies in Sociology of Culture and Mass Media. His doctoral thesis “Cinema as Artistic Communication” was on Sociology of the Cinema. He worked as an adjunct professor at the Department of Sociology, the University of Crete from 1990 – 1993. After that (1994 – 1996) he worked as an adjunct professor at the Department of Primary Education, University of Ioannina, and in 1996 he was elected lecturer in the same department (1996 – 2001).

He has also taught as  Erasmus Visiting Professor at the Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey (2019),  as Visiting Professor at the School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai, China (2018), at the Institute of Journalism “Taras Shevchenko”, National University of Ukraine (2014),  at the Department of Journalism, Fredrick University (Cyprus) (2012), at the Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski” (Bulgaria) (2011), and he has given lectures as invited speaker in KDU- Malaysia (2019), in the ELTE University of Budapest (Hungary, in 2013, 2016, 2017, 2019), in the Institute of Social Sciences in Lisbon (Portugal, 1n 2013) and in the Cyprus University of Technology (2016), as well as at various Universities in Greece.

He conducts regularly research on Greek printed, television, and online news and has conducted more than 25 research projects as Primary Investigator. Some of his recent research projects are: The media coverage of the Greek referendum 2015 (2015 – 2016), Journalistic Ethics and the Greek Media ( 2014 – 2015), Crisis, Golden Dawn and the Media (2014), Crisis and political behavior – the representation of the right-wing parties in the Greek media (2014), Crisis and the Facebook (2013), Media, crisis and journalistic impartiality (2012), The logic of medium in time of crisis (2011), The content in the social networking media: Facebook (2011), H1N1 flu, the media and the views of doctors and nurses (2010). He is a member of many Greek and international academic organizations and the current President of the Hellenic Sociological Society. During the 2011 – 2014 period, he was Vice Coordinator of the Research Network 18 (Media Sociology) of the European Sociological Association. Between 2011 – 2015 and since December 2017 – he is Chairman of the Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Athens. He is also a founding member of the European Centre for Press Freedom and Media Freedom (ECPMF) and a former member of its Supervisory Board. Since November 2016 he is a board member of the Greek National Council for Radio and Television (NCRTV).

Joanna Tsiganou, Research Director, Ph.D., Greek National Center for Social Research

Joanna Tsiganou is a lawyer, Doctor of Sociology of Crime and Deviance of the University of London (Ph.D., LSE 1988). As a member of the research staff of EKKE, he has participated (since 1994 onwards) in the design and implementation of research projects and programs, in the familiarization and consolidation of new research tools and research infrastructures through international, European, and Greek scientific networks and collaborations and in the diffusion of research findings in international and Greek fora (i.e. university courses and lectures, conferences, publications, books, and periodical editions, etc.). At the same time, she has gained valuable experience in the management of research projects as well as in the administrative issues related to the design and development of the research development strategy of EKKE with the qualities of the Vice-Chairman of the Board of EKKE, the Director of the Institute of Political Sociology of EKKE, the member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Institute but also as a participant with various qualities in the scientific and administrative bodies, associations and scientific societies. She has participated in more than 45 research papers, has authored more than 100 articles and monographs, independently and with other scholars, published in Greek and international scientific journals and collective volumes, and has participated in the publication and editing of 25 books together with colleagues and autonomously. Finally, she has been teaching for a number of years in tertiary education and participates as an expert in: a) international – European scientific networks of experts, b) evaluations of research and basic and applied for research programs, and c) scientific committees of scientific publications, newspapers, and periodicals.

Conference Program

Conference Programme

Book of Abstracts is now Available! Please click here to download.

Conference Workshops

Digital methods in the research about deviance: between qualitative and big data analytics ROINIOTI ELINA, Postdoctoral Researcher PANTEION University Professor SKARPELOS YANNIS, PANTEION University Format: A 3-hour workshop on methods for analyzing big data from a qualitative (and unavoidably some quantitative) point of view. A digital methods workshop in three parts: content analysis of videos, distant viewing of thousands of images in the analysis of visual culture, and natural language processing of social media content. The methods and techniques displayed may be used in a wide spectrum of disciplines and subjects. In this workshop we will focus on videos, photos and tweets related to the Capitol Riots that took place on January 6, 2021 in Washington DC. The data were obtained from several sources such as Instagram, Twitter and the Parler, a social network used by pro-Trump rioteers and alt-right supporters. Yannis Skarpelos (1hour lecture): Distant viewing of big visual corpora The first part will be dedicated to Distant Viewing of big visual corpora, explaining the theoretical background of such an endeavor as well as the technique used upon 2,427 images collected from Instagram. Distant viewing is a parallel to the concept of ‘distant reading’, developed by digital Humanities in order to computationally analyze big literary corpora whilst following a tradition in large-scale literary history developed two centuries ago (Underwood, 2017). According to Underwood the concept of distant reading “underlines the macroscopic scale of recent literary-historical experiments, without narrowly specifying theoretical presuppositions, methods, or objects of analysis”. In the same vein, a recent understanding of distant viewing describes it as “a methodological and theoretical framework for studying large collections of visual material (…) making explicit the interpretive nature of extracting semantic metadata from images” (Arnold & Tilton, 2019). We will develop the basic ideas behind the concept of distant viewing, the possible outcomes for academic research, and showcase an exemplar analysis of the images collected from Instagram to provide some possible explanations. Elina Roinioti (1h lecture): Analysing user-generated videos from Capitol Riots: Methodology notes on video data analysis The second part will focus on the uses of video analysis and video elicitation techniques. During the Capitol Riots social networks like Parler, were flooded with video footage from protestors, outside and inside the Capitol. In the context of visual sociology, these videos will be reframed as critical documentation regarding the social practices, settings and symbols that framed the events of January 6th, 2021. Our goal is to discuss the potential and constraints of repurposing user-generated videos and the methodological steps from sampling to transcribing and coding video data. Video elicitation, as a qualitative research method that uses video as a mean of “narrativisation of identity” (Holiday, 2000) through practices of reflexive-ethnography, will provide extra methodological tools for participants. Yannis Skarpelos (1 h lecture): Natural Language Processing of Social Media Content The third part will turn to the analysis of linguistic content, and the use of computational tools for natural language processing, involving modeling the topics to be found in the tweets posted during the day the riots took place, and measuring their emotional content. Natural Language Processing (in short NLP) has been developed by computational linguistics in order to understand big linguistic corpora. While akin to distant reading, when confronting social media content, the method has to answer to different challenges. Topic modeling allows for mapping topics discussed by social media users, while sentiment analysis allows for understanding their emotional charge. We will develop the basic ideas behind those two methods and experiment with the corpus of tweets. Aim: The aim of the workshop is to present a spectrum of tools and methods to be used in social sciences, as well as to show their interoperability in the context of designing a single research. Keywords: Digital tools, digital methods, video analysis, distant viewing, Natural Language Processing Targeted audience: The workshop will be open to all participants: graduate and doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, academics and practitioners. References: Arnold, T., & Tilton, L. (2019). Distant viewing: analyzing large visual corpora. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 34(Supplement_1), i3-i16. Underwood, T. (2017). A Genealogy of Distant Reading. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 11(2).

Registration

Register now for the conference!

Registration fees

The early registration fees apply to registrations made before 01 May 2021

The above fees (in Euro) include the following:

• Admission to all conference sessions
• Conference workshops
• Conference documentation
• Certificate of attendance

Cancellations

In case of cancellation of a registration for the conference the Center for the Study of Crime (CSC) adheres to the following rules:

1. A processing fee will be deducted in case of reimbursement. The reason is that the firm that deals with the credit-payment takes a commission for each operation. Therefore, in this case, the CSC is paying two commissions.
2. No reimbursement will be made for cancellations arriving after 01 May 2021.

How to register?

You can register and pay for the conference here!

https://athensconf2021.synedry.com/services/registration.aspx

Registration is handled by the Center for the Study of Crime (CSC). Payment methods will include Visa, MasterCard, or bank transfer. For practical reasons, we prefer payment with a credit card.

If you have any questions relating to registration please contact the Center for the Study of Crime (CSC) at athensconf2021@gmail.com

Call Abstracts for the Conference

Abstract Submission

Deadlines

The submission period opens  01 February 2021

The deadline for abstract submission is 07 April 2021

Submission guidelines

Submit your abstract here!

https://athensconf2021.synedry.com/abstracts/submission.aspx

All submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the Scientific Program Committee. All accepted abstracts will be published electronically and made available to participants at the conference. All presenters must pay to register for the Conference.

1. Indicate the format of your abstract and the following details:

Individual paper presentation

• Name(s) author(s), name(s) presenter(s), affiliation (of all), email and work address (corresponding author), phone number (corresponding author)
• Abstract (400 words maximum) and 2 to 5 keywords
• Extra info/comments such as technical requirements (if applicable)

Full thematic panel

• Title of the panel, content/abstract of the thematic panel
• Add up to 4 parts, each consisting of:
  name(s) author(s), name(s) presenter(s), affiliation (of all), email and work address (corresponding author), phone number (corresponding author)
• Abstract (400 words maximum) and 2 to 5 keywords
• Discussant (optional) (name and affiliation)
• Extra info/comments such as technical requirements (if applicable)

Note that authors need to register individually, but the abstract submission can proceed via one corresponding author.

Organization of a workshop or alternative format session

• Convener(s): name(s), affiliation of all, email and work address (corresponding author), phone number (corresponding author)
• Outline the format, aims, and content of the proposed workshop (1000 words maximum) and 2 to 5 keywords
• Targeted audience (400 words), the maximum number of participants?
• Requirements (preparation of the participants, logistics, etc.)
• Organization of alternative format sessions (submit a proposal A4: aims, organizers, requirements, etc.)

2. Indicate one or more ‘streams’ for each abstract:

• Examining qualitative research approaches:
  Multiple (mixed) methods in approaching deviance and social control;
  Phenomenological approaches in criminology: current narrations and discourses;
  Ethnographies of movements: (sub)urban changes in context;
  Crime discourses and narrations in Ethnomethodology;
  Studying emotions, seductions, and harms in crime and punishment;
  (Μetanalysis): Stories behind the stories from the field;
  (Un)Lawful identities: research illustrations in progress.
• Digital and online methods:
  Digital ‘portraits’ of deviance and social control;
  Doing research on the (inter)net.
• New challenges and paradigms:
  The Covid-19 Pandemic and Social Science (Qualitative) Research: Challenges and difficulties;
  Qualitative research vis-a-vis Big-data. New challenges for criminology;
  Changing paradigms of qualitative research methods;
  Between borders and barriers: constructing methodologies and epistemologies;
  Ethical boundaries of criminological research.
• Power imbalances:
  Postcolonial research perspectives in criminology;
  Participatory (action) research with the socially excluded;
  Observations of contemporary inequalities and power dynamics in criminal justice;
  Life-histories of the controllers and the controlled;
  Visual and kinesics approaches: victims and offenders;
  Gender-based research perspectives in deviance and social control).

If you have any questions relating to the submission of your abstract please contact the Center for the Study of Crime (CSC) via mail at athensconf2021@gmail.com.

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F.A.Q

Abstract submission

1. What are the guidelines for the different types of submissions?

The new final date for abstracts’ submission is 07 April 2021

You can view guidelines for each type of abstract here. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at athensconf2021@gmail.com

2. What information should be included in an abstract?

Abstracts for all submissions are limited to 400 words. The title, authors, and institutions are excluded.

Corresponding authors are asked to indicate the presentation type, the abstract topics, the names of the authors, their affiliations, contact details of the corresponding/presenting author, and 2 to 5 keywords.

3. When are the deadlines for submitting?

Abstracts and proposals submission deadline: 31 March 2021