SOLON: Promoting Interdisciplinary Studies in Crime and Bad Behaviour
CURRENT/RECENT EVENTS:
Experiencing the Law, IV, will be held on 4 December 2009, at IALS, carrying CPD points
Theme: Objectifying Children: Policy-making, Law and Human Rights Responses. Key speakers include Professor Jean La Fontaine, Dr Rebecca Probert, Dr Penny Booth, Dr Kate Bradley
SOLON is currently planning a one-day conference for autumn 2010 on genocide and terrorism, as well as the second War Crimes, to be held in 2011. Associated with this, we remind visitors to the SOLON website of the ongoing work of EPAF, Peru and others (see the Advocacy Project website: http://www.advocacynet.org/page/home; and also http://epafperu.org/ ), the Cambodia trials (see http://www.cambodiatribunal.org/). Also see articles by Lesley Abdela on the Open Democracy website http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-resolution_1325/conflict_2929.jsp and talk below.
Lesley Abdela, MBE, UK Woman Political Journalist of the Year 2009 to speak about the new United Nations ‘super’ agency for Women in the UN.
The new “fully and ambitiously funded” agency will work to close the gap between rhetoric and reality and implement the UN’s commitment to women’s rights.
The talk entitled The United Nations – Putting Its House in Order on Women is open to the public Tuesday, 13 October 7:30 at St. John’s Church Hall, St. John’s Road, Tunbridge Wells.
Lesley is an international women’s human rights campaigner who has worked for over 25 years in the fields of gender development and peace processes. She is known worldwide as an expert on the advance of women in politics and public Life, working as an advisor in 40 different countries.
ABOUT SOLON:
SOLON is a consortium of academics and professionals/practitioners based in a partnership between Nottingham Trent, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth and Liverpool John Moores Universities (listed in order of joining). SOLON has links to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) and Centre for Contemporary British History (CCBH), in the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, as well as to Rainer’s Communities That Care, and with a number of other universities, networks and centres interested in the themes of bad behaviour and crime. The consortium also works in association with the NCCL Galleries of Justice, the nation’s Museum of Law, based in Nottingham and a holder of important archive resources for the history of law, crime and punishment (including the national Prison Service Collection). Managed by a Board of Directors drawn from the partner institutions, SOLON aims to bring together academics and practitioners across boundaries of disciplines and experience through its website, its conference series such as Experiencing the Law, plus occasional events such as seminars. It has sponsored a number of publications, notably its associated online Journal Crimes and Misdemeanours: Deviance and the Law in Historical Perspective
SOLON represents an innovative form of cross-disciplinary academic-professional Partnership, which provides a focus for interdisciplinary research and application of that research to a range of issues and problems, past and present, in the fields of ‘bad’ behaviour and ‘socially visible’ crime. Bad behaviour represents that which goes beyond the purely criminal, to include that which is socially instead of, or as well as, legally offensive, incorporating that which in legal terms falls under the remit of the civil process. The concept of ‘socially visible’ crime provides a focus on that which is so high profile that, locally, nationally or internationally, it causes popular concern, outrage or even panic.
SOLON promotes consciousness of the reality that there are fluid boundaries, changing over time in different societies, between the merely offensive and offences in the legal sense. This project seeks to enable and promote wide-ranging interdisciplinary research which will explore factors producing both change and continuities in attitudes towards such conduct, especially through use of the concept of social panics and resultant moral outrage, frequently publicly expressed and disseminated through media forms.
SOLON aims to place conclusions and solutions arising from its work in the public domain, through this website, through conferences, seminars and public lectures, as well as publications and other forms of popular dissemination.
SOLON is the acronym chosen for this major interdisciplinary and practitioner project. Solon, one of the Seven Wise Men of Athens, was a noted legal reformer.
SOLON = Society, Order, Law, Offences, Notoriety
DIRECTORS: The current SOLON Board of Directors consists of the two founder members, Dr Judith Rowbotham (NTU) and Dr Kim Stevenson (now University of Plymouth), plus Professor David Nash (OBU), Dr Anne Marie Kilday (OBU), Dr Cassie Watson (OBU); Dr Richard Williams (Plymouth), Dr Zoe James (Plymouth); Dr Samantha Pegg (NTU); Dr Lorie Charlesworth (LJMU), Professor George Mair (LJMU). Dr Shani D’Cruze (formerly MMU, Honorary Fellow, Keele) is an Emeritus Member of the Board in the light of her role as Director of the Feminist Crime Research Network) The Board’s disciplinary expertise brings together the core SOLON disciplines of Law and History, and also links in criminology and sociology
Register as a SOLON Network Member
Associate networks and centres:
SOLON works with and hosts the webpages for the Feminist Crime Research Network (Director: Shani D’Cruze; Steering Group Members: Dr Louise Jackson (Edinburgh), Dr Judith Rowbotham; Dr Kim Stevenson). Focusing on crime and gender in the twentieth century, FRCN organised an ESRC-funded seminar series on this theme between 2002 and 2004.
SOLON is also associated with The Nottingham Centre for the Study and Reduction of Hate Crime (Hate Crimes Centre), based in the Criminology Section of NTU, directed by Dr Mike Sutton. This draws together academics and practitioners from across the globe to discuss issues and advance policy in this area. Its conferences and publications, including the Internet Journal of Criminology, all promote information on a series of initiatives in the highly topical field of Hate Crime.
SOLON Activities:
SOLON organises and hosts national and international conferences and seminars on a range of interdisciplinary themes associated with bad behaviour and crime, some with its associate networks, as well as developing funding bids for a range of projects, such as the cataloguing of the national Prison Service Collection Archive with the Galleries of Justice. It regularly arranges for the publication of papers given at SOLON-sponsored conferences, either in edited volumes or in special journal issues. SOLON maintains an active website (currently hosted by the University of Plymouth), which includes the SOLON Database of Victorian Crime Reporting, which is constantly being expanded.
Details of SOLON conferences are publicised on the SOLON website, which also provides access to a wide range of information about current and future events and resources connected with Crime and Bad Behaviour.
SOLON also encourages postgraduate research across interdisciplinary boundaries and seeks to promote opportunities for PHD work
Bodichon Restoration Appeal - Barbera Bodichon was one of the greatest feminist activists of the nineteenth century - SOLON is supporting an appeal to restore and maintain her grave at Brightling Church Sussex