National Deviancy SymposiumThe National Deviancy Symposium (or National Deviancy Conference) consisted of a group of British criminologists dissatisfied with orthodox British criminology who met at the University of York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The group included Paul Rock, David Downes, Laurie Taylor, Stan Cohen, Ian Taylor and Jock Young.[1] Many members later became involved in critical criminology and/or Left realism. FoundationThe NDC was formed in July 1968, as a radical breakaway from the Third National Conference of Teaching and Research on Criminology at the University of Cambridge by seven individuals. These seven were Kit Carson, Stan Cohen, David Downes, Mary Susan McIntosh, Paul Rock, Ian Taylor and Jock Young.[2] Sir Leon Radzinowicz, one of the most important figures in post-war criminology in Britain, recounts the formation of the National Deviancy Symposium:
As Radzinowcz's account shows National Deviancy Conference was initially "deeply critical of the medico-psychological assumptions, social democratic politics, and atheoretical programme of what they termed 'positivist criminology'."[4] Early daysThe group proceeded to organise 13 conferences between 1968 and 1973,[5] publishing three sets of conference papers in the process. The group also tried to provide a financial support and a forum for campaign groups around criminal justice, such as "the gay, women's, mental patients' and prisoners' movements" such as Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners (PROP), Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP) and People not Psychiatry.[2][6] Of the group's biggest successes was helping to set up in 1974 the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Control.[7] DivergenceHowever, by the mid-1970s conferences began to be held less regularly, and academics worked on their own individual branch of critical criminology.[8] Ian Taylor, Jock Young and Paul Walton wrote the groundbreaking The New Criminology in 1973, following that with the edited collection, Critical Criminology, in 1975 writing on the need for a marxist, "fully social" theory of deviance. Whereas those around Stuart Hall, at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies focussed on "sub-cultures of imagination and resistance".[8] David Downes and Paul Rock put forward an interactionist approach in response to the neo-marxists in their 1979 compilation, Deviant Interpretations.[9] Their penultimate conference was entitled, Permissiveness and Control, and was held in 1977, where the NDC announced its end.[9] In January 1979 they held their last conference, a joint conference with the Conference of Socialist Economists Law and the State Group under the title 'Capitalist Discipline and the Rule of Law', the book Capitalism and the Rule of Law a product of this work.[10] In his contribution in this book, Jock Young first coined the term left idealism and is said to have been converted to left realism.[9] The new National Deviancy ConferenceThe conference was revived in 2011 and held at the University of York. Many of the original contributors attended, including Jock Young, Stanley Cohen and Tony Jefferson. New blood mixed with the old, and speeches from scholars such as Robert Reiner, Steve Hall, Keith Hayward, Simon Hallsworth, Paul Hamilton, Phil Hodgeson John Lea, Mike Sutton, Simon Winlow, Andrew Wilson, Kevin Stenson and Mark Horsley called for new theories to analyse crime and control in today's world. The conference was organized by Simon Winlow and Rowland Atkinson. The National Deviancy Conference was held again at Teesside University in 2014. The theme was 'critical criminology and post-crash capitalism'. It was organized by the Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology. The plenary speakers were Rowland Atkinson, Emaonn Carrabine, Walter DeKeseredy, Steve Hall, Keith J. Hayward, John Lea, Maggie O'Neill, Vincenzo Ruggerio and Sandra Walklate. Publications of National Deviancy Conferences
Publications from the new National Deviancy Conference
References
|