Digital Criminology: Criminal Justice and Knowledge Production

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

Knowledge and ways of knowing are undergoing profound transformations, in criminal justice and elsewhere. Digitalization and the emerging «data imperative» is transforming existing organizational forms, hierarchies of knowledge, and challenging legal rules and normative beliefs (Fourcade and Healy, 2024). This panel examines criminal justice digitalization through the intertwining of knowledge, technology and governance and explores knowledge production as a socio-economic and techno-cultural phenomenon. The emerging digital knowledge economy is also driven by powerful commercial forces and private knowledge regimes are increasingly becoming encoded into state practices, yet this form of privatization has so far received little focus within criminological scholarship.


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

• Katja Franko, University of Oslo

Individual Presentations

• “The dream to know everything about everyone”: affordances of commercial data systems and digital netwidening in policing - Pete Fussey, University of Southampton; Katerina Hadjimatheou, University of Essex

• Pursuits of Knowledge in Evidence-Based and Intelligence-Led Policing - Camilla Løvschall Langeland, University of Oslo

• The rule of data and the rule of law - Thea Myrvang, University of Oslo

• Outsourcing the brains: The epistemic power of consultancies in criminal justice - Katja Franko, University of Oslo; Heidi Mork Lomell, University of Oslo

• Knowing wrongful conviction by participating in streaming true crime - Greg Stratton, RMIT University