Tips for a Successful Twitter Conference

James is Chair of the British Society of Criminology’s Green Criminology Research Network and an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Nottingham. His research interests focus on crimes of the powerful more broadly and environmental harm more specifically. His current work looks at the social construction of environmental deviance.

Twitter conferences reach huge audiences. During its two-day symposium, 62,000 people viewed tweets from the Green Criminology Research Network’s account. Twitter was the main vehicle for advertising the event, contributing to 1,800 people viewing the call for papers and 2,100 the subsequent speaker schedule. Over 120 people watched keynote addresses from Dr Angus Nurse and Dr Jenny Maher in real-time. All in all, not bad for an event that cost nothing but time to organise or attend.

Twitter is a relatively new medium for academic conferences. It provides ‘speakers’ with the opportunity to share their research in five or so tweets over fifteen minutes. This is then followed by a fifteen-minute Q&A, a time-limit mainly there to encourage audience movement between papers. With only 1,400 characters, presenters are encouraged to be inventive. The Green Criminology conference saw a mixture of images, videos, charts and text being used to effectively communicate research.

With the prospect of repeated and regional lockdowns on the horizon, Covid-19 brought to the fore issues of accessibility and predictability. These were compounded by widespread restriction of university travel budgets and an intensification of workloads incurred by the rapid shift to online teaching. In this context, preparing for a face-to-face conference seemed futile. Accounting for these circumstances, and taking cue from the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, among others, the Green Criminology Research Network steering group decided that a Twitter conference would be the best way to proceed.

On reflection, Twitter conferences primarily benefit from their inclusivity and accessibility. Anybody with a computer or smartphone can participate and – no longer bound by transport costs, travel time or prohibitively expensive conference fees – almost anybody can attend. Even those in different time zones can use the ‘schedule Tweet’ function to post their ‘paper’ in advance or just catch up with Tweets after the event has ended. Indeed, the Green Criminology symposium hosted over twenty speakers from nine countries, including Israel and Australia. There is also no need to share slides following an event or ask permission to record video-streams because Tweets can be viewed long into the future (provided they are not deleted). However, such benefits are not without their challenges, two of which can be overcome with a little preparatory work.

First, without adequate guidance on what is ultimately an unfamiliar conference format, there is potential for exclusivity. The format may deter those unfamiliar with Twitter, or indeed digital technology more broadly. This is not an inherently bad thing. It may provide a platform for less familiar scholars to present their work, opening up a space for ECRs, and allow technically capable scholars to showcase skills unfamiliar at traditional conferences. Nevertheless, inclusivity is favourable. So, the Green Criminology Network established ground rules from the very start aimed at preventing uncertainty or ambiguity. The call for papers therefore included sections on ‘How will the Twitter Conference Work?’, ‘What if I don’t have a Twitter Account?’, ‘Presenter Guidelines’, ‘Tips and Tricks’, and offered examples from other conferences so people could see how the format worked in practice.

Second, without some way of organising relevant Tweets from the myriad of individual Twitter accounts, there is potential for disorganisation and fragmentation. To address this, three ‘navigation points’ were created through which people could access the conference. First, the Speaker Schedule used Microsoft Sway to link to speaker abstracts and Twitter accounts, providing direct access to papers. This removed the need to navigate Twitter and improved inclusivity among those unfamiliar with the platform. Second, a short, relevant, and consistently used hashtag was important. #GreenCrime2021 was used in the initial call for papers and in every conference tweet prior to, during, and after the event. This provided an easy search term for those wanting to gather all conference tweets in one place. Third and finally, the Tweet Schedule tool provided automatic signposting from the network’s official Twitter account. A Tweet linking to each new speaker, with a title of their paper, was scheduled to send 5 minutes before they were due to present. This meant that anyone could navigate the conference in real-time simply by accessing the network’s Twitter account.

While these measures ensured a successful Twitter conference, it is worth noting that the lack of face-to-face interaction was felt. Questions were asked, answers were forthcoming and discussion ensued, but the inability to see others was a notably absent quality. This is where face-to-face conferences always have the upper hand, whether in-person or over video-call. Indeed, it is for this reason that Twitter may be better suited to research showcases, PGR-conferences, or alongside traditional conferences as a means of expanding the reach of papers. In whichever manner they are used, Twitter conferences have their place. It is worth remembering, however, that their success is contingent on effective preparation; a little of which goes a long way.

Watch again

Keynote video from Dr Angus Nurse

Keynote video from Dr Jenny Maher

Contact

Dr James Heydon, University of Nottingham

Twitter: @Jwheydon

Photographs courtesy of author 

Political & Social Control Through Criminal Laws: politics of criminalisation in India

Naveed Mehmood Ahmad is currently working as a Research Fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. He works in the area of criminal justice reform and has previously worked on the issue of criminalization of drug use in India. 

Human behaviour is governed by socially constructed norms that create acceptable paths of conduct. Any nonconformity with this is termed, by the mainstream, as ‘deviant behaviour’. When a conduct challenges societal sensibilities, recourse is often taken to laws for a more formal and sustained sanction. Criminal laws reflect this socially constructed idea of ‘deviant behaviour’ and categorize conduct that attract society’s condemnation as ‘crimes’. Since there is an underlying social and political current that drives criminal law, the legal construction of crime changes with the societal construction of deviance. This willingness of the State to co-opt social condemnation risks criminalising trivial acts or conduct that may offend sensibilities of the majority or dominant communities.

Conceptualising ‘crime’ and stricter penalties to satiate demands of the society often leads to a crisis of over-criminalisation and over-penalisation. It also institutionalises societal divisions and leads to marginalisation. For years, millions of people across the world have been criminalised for the mere expression of their sexual orientation or for consumption of prohibited drugs. Most legal systems today continue to respond to dominant value systems either by retaining or by removing criminal sanctions against drug use and homosexuality. Similarly, differing value systems continue to reflect in the criminal laws that seek to regulate, faith, personal relationships, eating habits etc.

Since, societal sensibilities govern conceptualisation of crime, their effect can also be seen in enforcement of criminal law. Inherent prejudices tend to categorise only certain kinds of deviant behaviour and even communities as criminal. This is evident from enforcement of criminal laws across the world, where racial/religious minorities are disproportionately affected by law enforcement.

Mirroring trends across the globe, the Indian prison statistics show that the percentage of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe prisoners in Indian jails is substantially higher, when compared to their proportion in the population. Research also suggests that Muslims are likely to be overrepresented in prisons as pre-trial and undertrial detainees and therefore tend to be over-incarcerated. As analysed here, 22 states in India have a higher proportion of Muslim prisoners than the Muslim population in the state. In a more recent trend, the politics of criminalisation has changed its character. It has now been used as an effective tool to further a goal of political, social and economic marginalisation.

Although preventive detention laws have for long been used to subvert judicial processes and fair trial, over the past few years it seems these laws have been exceedingly used to against Muslims. Forming only 14% of India’s population, Muslims form 16.6% of the convicts, 18.7% of the undertrial prisoners and 35.8% of the detainees in Indian prisons. The percentage of Muslims detainees has grown exponentially in Uttar Pradesh where it has gone from 33% in 2017 and 58% in 2018 to 83.9% in 2019. In addition to preventive detention, laws against cow slaughter, religious conversion and triple talaq – a form of instant divorce practiced by some Muslims, are pushing more Muslims into the criminal justice system.

Rooted in Brahmanical tradition, laws against slaughter of bovine animals criminalise millions of beef eating Hindus, Muslims, Christians etc. and marginalise farmers and cattle traders who now find it rather perilous to keep cows. Although the more vociferous opposition to these laws has come from Dalit groups trying to resist this attempt at maintaining caste hegemony, the manner in which the laws have been used in the recent years reflects a rather concerted political action. Over the past few years, due to an overwhelmingly communal rhetoric, dozens of people – mostly Muslims, have been lynched by mobs for transporting cows and for allegedly eating, storing or carrying beef. It has been reported that 98% of such violent incidents, since 2010, have taken place after the current dispensation came into power in 2014.  Instead of attempting to put an end to this vigilante violence, the State has chosen to reinforce the beef ban through laws; institutionalise cow protection groups; register cases against victims and shield perpetrators. As the debate on cow protection reignites, a more recent push for enacting an anti-cow slaughter law in Karnataka has been termed to be state sanctioned violence against Muslims and Dalits under the cover of law.

Criminalisation of Muslims was taken a step ahead when the government enacted the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019. Although the Act is in accordance with the constitutional bench decision of the Supreme Court and declares ‘triple talaq’ to be void, having no effect on the marriage, it goes on to criminalise the act of pronouncing ‘talaq’ thrice, attracting an imprisonment of three years. While the government justified the enactment by stating that it will bring justice to Muslim women, it has been termed as an attempt to criminalise Muslim men rather than an attempt to emancipate Muslim women.

Male chauvinism and Islamophobia resurfaced as legal paternalism when anti-conversion laws began to be reshaped to have a chilling effect on inter-religious marriages. Although the recently passed Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020 has been criticised for criminalising the right to choice, it is even more problematic for it has roots in the idea of preserving caste through endogamy. Building on claims that Hindu women are being converted to Islam under the garb of marriage, the new anti-conversion laws, while being blatantly sexist are aimed at vilifying Muslim men and to create more avenues for pushing them into the criminal justice system. With dozens of people already arrested under the law, it has proved to be a shot in the arm for communal forces operating on ground.

The concerns discussed above are a mere reflection of the unprecedented change occurring in India’s social and political life. While this may continue for the foreseeable future, there is an emergent need to revisit the debates on the extent of criminal law. The fact that criminal law can be so easily guided to achieve political ends, is reflective of the fact that its superstructure is not based on solid principles, immune from divisive political agendas. Although the ‘harm principles’ have been central to the discussion on the extent of criminal law, they have never really been universally followed, perhaps because legal systems haven’t conceptualised a force behind them. While stating that shifting and subjective notions of right and wrong cannot be a valid justification for restriction of fundamental rights, the Naz Foundation judgement envisioned constitutional morality as guiding framework for criminal laws and not popular morality. If the tendency of criminal law to co-opt social and political goals is to be checked and its marginalising tendency eradicated, the policy of criminalisation must be guided by constitutional principles.

Contact

Naveed Mehmood Ahmad works as a Research Fellow with the Criminal Justice team at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, New Delhi.

Email: ahmadnaveed183@gmail.com

Photographs courtesy of author 

Silencing the Streets: From Covid Exceptions to Police Crackdowns

Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti, Deanna Dadusc, Raph Schlembach and Lambros Fatsis

Previously published by the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics, University of Brighton

As news of the kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard by a Metropolitan Police Officer became a headline story, a vigil held in her memory was violently suppressed by the very same police force on Clapham Common in London. Both incidents should shock us, but they should occasion no surprise. The world may have suddenly woken up to the reality of violence against women — as it belatedly grappled with police racism after last summer’s #BLM protests — but institutionalised misogyny and police violence are nothing new.

Rather than representing an exception, these events confirmed once more that police violence is not the result of “bad apples” of “isolated accidents”. Migrant women, Black women, women of colour and those who are non-normatively gendered are subject to  racist policing and patriarchal violence every day. For decades, they have been saying that the police are not the answer to gendered and racist violence, but part of the problem. The strength of this political moment — however delayed — is that many (carceral) feminist groups who still addressed the police as a solution to gendered violence and who called for more security, more police and more prisons can now learn from the demands and struggles of social movements and community groups that call for the abolition of the police and the criminal legal system as a whole.

These new alliances, coalitions and the protests they inspire are powerful, but they are already targeted and pursued as “dangerous” and “threatening” by the state and its law enforcement institutions through the introduction of the UK government’s Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Rightly nicknamed the “crackdown bill” by those who oppose it, this 296-page document parades its anti-protest stance with pride — raising concerns over its illiberal, undemocratic and discriminatory nature from leading human rights organisations, charities, campaigners and more than 700 legal scholars who (rightly) fear that that aspects of the current emergency powers included in the Coronavirus Act are here to stay. Introduced as a piece of legislation that gives new protections and powers to the police, this new Bill allows senior police officers and the Home Secretary to restrict protest activity in unprecedented ways, while also criminalising the living circumstances of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

When Protesting Became a Crime

Under the Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the police can now impose conditions on static assemblies, including timings and approved noise levels, even when the protest is held by just a single person. It will now become a crime to fail to follow police restrictions that protesters “ought” to have known and it will become an offence to intentionally or recklessly cause public nuisance as part of a protest, however vague or ill-defined this phrase is. Such authoritarian crackdowns on the right to protest are hardly unexpected and entirely consistent with the government’s “law and order” agenda, whose enmity towards protest has been expressed in public statements that described the most recent wave of the Black Lives Matter protests as ‘dreadful’ and labelled Extinction Rebellion activists as ‘criminals’ who ‘disrupt our free society’. Such inflammatory remarks could be ignored as mere reactionary ramblings, yet they threaten to become law. A recent HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) report, which accompanies and complements the Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, describes ‘activity that seeks to bring about political or social change but does so in a way that involves unlawful behaviour or criminality’ as ‘aggravated activism’. Adopting a Counter Terrorism Policing definition of activism as a form of domestic extremism, such language signals an era of renewed expansion of surveillance on political and social movements.

The criminalisation of dissent that such new legislation further enables is an assault on everyone’s protest rights. The violent suppression of last weekend’s vigils, however, reminds us that men and women are policed differently, as a national study on anti-fracking protests revealed. Scenes of police officers barging into a crowd of mourners, throwing women to the ground and making arrests — as eyewitnesses report — are of a piece with groping and the pulling of clothing to reveal women’s breasts by police officers. A public inquiry is currently investigating the extent to which secretive undercover policing units permitted police officers to deceive female activists into long-term, intimate relationships. Those women who have found that they had been targeted for such operations after their partners’ sudden departures from their lives have long accused the police of institutional sexism and are seeking redress. The practice of having sexual relationships with women in protest groups was apparently so common that some of the victims have spoken of officers conspiring to rape.

As a group of Criminologists at the University of Brighton, we are deeply concerned and angered by tactics used to clamp down on the women-led vigil in Victoria Gardens by the local police force. Neither the statement from Sussex Police, nor the silence from Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne fill us with confidence that lessons will be learned, or decision-makers will be held accountable. It comes as no surprise to us that further protests have been held outside Brighton police station. Many messages and notes left at the temporary memorial to Sarah Everard in Brighton reveal the deep-seated distrust of policing solutions to male violence. “Police don’t protect”, reads one. “You can’t trust the police anymore”, says another. And “more police powers is never the answer”. As many claimed: “We do not want your protection – just stop killing us”.

Policing Protests and the Politics of Disposability

Making sense of these events, urges us to set up before us a broader canvas for a better understanding of policing and violence against women than conventional portraits of the matter allow. It is worth remembering that the protest vigils were met with police violence because they were against police violence. Such attempts to control, limit, silence and dilute dissenting voices is part of a long process of serving, protecting, maintaining and enforcing an unequal social order that is marked by hierarchies of gender, class, sexuality and “race”. What the policing against last weekend’s vigil and the introduction of the crackdown Bill as an extension of police powers and emergency government reveal, is an attempt to dismantle political opposition and social movements. This political logic exposes the State’s hostile relationship to those who are racialised, gendered and classed as subordinate by ensuring that they feel the full force of the law. Such politics of disposability, or what Achille Mbembe calls ‘necropolitics’ encourage us to understand policing, state violence and gender-based violence as interrelated. Defining ‘who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not’, as Mbembe notes, reminds us that the social order we are educated and socialised into is racial, as it is gendered and classed. To maintain such an order, an order maintenance institution is required, and the police are happy to oblige. This helps explain why those who are policed and treated with violence; physical, psychological or structural are Black people, those who are non-normatively gendered and those who are classed as a precarious and disposable workforce.

As we grapple with the implications of the current moment and the intersectional thinking that it requires of us, it is imperative to recognise, as the Combahee River Collective Statement compels us to do four decades after its publication, that ‘the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy’. Rethinking our current political moment, therefore, requires us to think about capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy as political economic and cultural systems of oppression that share a common language, ethic and purpose. The policing of protests against police violence therefore illustrates what policing is, what it does, who does it do it to, and who does it do it for; urging us to understand policing as an order maintenance institution that serves and protects a social order that is racialised as “white”, gendered as male or divided into heteronormative binaries and classed according to economic status. If we are to understand policing, we also ought to understand state violence. And to understand state violence, we need to understand that state formation itself is violent, depending as it does on an extractive and repressive logic that is imposed and therefore coercive by its very nature. And this extractive and repressive logic is disproportionately exercised on those who are racialised, gendered and classed as subordinate. As the State proceeds by arming itself with extra powers, empowering ourselves with the knowledge that “toxic masculinity kills” and that “police don’t keep us safe” is the first step towards making our demands heard and remaking the world we want to live in by mobilising our energies to create the conditions for the abolition of interlocking systems of oppression.

Originally published by the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics, University of Brighton