CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: Women, Narrative and Crime: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Teesside University (Darlington Campus)

9^th July 2015

Keynote Speakers: Deborah Jermyn (Roehampton) & Lizzie Seal (Sussex)

From Pat Barker’s novel Blow Your House Down (1984) to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel From Hell(1999) and Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s stage musical London Road (2011), artists, writers and film-makers have explored the collective memory and cultural meaning of crimes against women, both past and present. This interdisciplinary conference will bring to together researchers and practitioners from the arts, humanities and socials sciences to explore questions of narrative and crime in relation to violence against women, as well as addressing themes relating to women, crime and justice more broadly. 

This conference will critically explore the growing recognition within the social sciences of ‘popular’ criminological texts (Rafter, 2007) - such as film, TV drama, crime fiction, true-crime  - as valid social documents, which shape both public and academic understandings of crime, justice and victimization, and offer alternative means of engaging with criminal events and ‘knowing’ about crime. This conference aims to explore how these ‘differing spheres of representation’ (Brown, 2003) deal with violence against women, reflecting on the relationship between academic and cultural texts (Wakeman, 2011), and the privileging of particular texts as a means of conveying feminist messages relating to misogyny, violence and victimhood.

We welcome abstracts (250 words) for 20 minute papers from researchers and practitioners working in the following fields: criminology; sociology; English; film and media studies; theatre and performance studies; the visual arts; women’s, gender, queer and transgender studies.

Themes for papers may include but are not limited to:

·         Feminism, violence against women and social media

·         Visual criminology

·         Crime, place and myth

·         True crime

·         Narrative criminology

·         Fiction, film, television drama, graphic novels, computer games, visual arts, performing arts

·         The politics and ethics of fictional reconstruction

·         Violence, intersectionality and difference

·         Genres of crime narrative – detective / crime fiction, historical fiction, documentary, creative non-fiction

This event is part of a British Academy funded project at Teesside University; the project explored the significance of the Yorkshire Ripper murders for those living closest to them and highlights how a range of narratives offered by the social sciences, true crime and crime fiction represent themes of misogyny, violence against women and fear of crime.

Abstracts (250 words) and brief author profiles should be submitted to wnccon@tees.ac.uk by 15^th April 2015.