Digital Criminology: Alternative Futures

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

Research on the crime-technology nexus has documented the harmful potential of digitalization with regards to crime and crime control. This scholarship has created an important foundation for new discussions to be had. At a time of crisis, these discussions circle around positive solutions and frameworks targeting the digital dimensions of crime and crime control. Papers of this panel develop arguments for holistic and rights-based approaches to policing that go beyond the individual human subject; AI that pays attention to notions of care, belonging, and trust in public safety policy; or the construction of counter-hegemonic narratives about the use of data in welfare-systems. The panel also asks: How should criminology as a discipline approach digitalization and contribute in a productive fashion, offering conceptual discussions, ideas of co-design and a structural debate about the contents of digital criminology.


This panel is part of collection of digital criminology panels at EUROCRIM2025 and contributes to innovative crime and justice scholarship within the emerging field of ‘digital criminology’.  Instead of positioning technology as separate from society more broadly, digital criminology takes up the idea that all technologies are embedded in social structures and that all societies are embedded in technological infrastructures. More specifically, digital criminology examines the incorporation of digital technologies, media, and infrastructures in criminological settings (Stratton, Powell and Cameron, 2018; Wood, 2020; Kaufmann and Lomell 2025, Van Brakel and Govaerts, 2025).

Subtopic

• Topic 5: Social Control and Criminal Justice / Policing and Law enforcement (Policing WG)

Chair

• Mareile Kaufmann, University of Oslo

Individual Presentations

• Digital policing of environmental crime: The need for ‘more-than-human’ criminology - Rosamunde Van Brakel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

• Creating alternative criminological futures  - Sanja Milivojevic, University of Bristol, Bristol Digital Futures Institute

• Turning surveillance on its head in low-trust neighborhoods - Majsa Storbeck, Erasmus University

• Performing conditionality: a theoretical framework on the creation of welfare subjectivities through data and data-driven technologies - Marijke Roosen, OsloMet

• On the Very Idea of a Digital Criminology - Mike Mcguire, University of Surrey