ICS Seminar Series - Professor David Gadd

Date: Thursday 14 August, 2014
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EB.2.21, UWS Parramatta South campus

Professor David Gadd

Losing the Race: Thinking Psychosocially About Racially Motivated Crime

Abstract

Racially motivated crime and violence is a particularly, perhaps uniquely, difficult phenomenon to come to terms with. Its significance and immediacy cannot be ignored; the urge to do something, anything, is almost too hard to resist. Yet, the problem also remains strangely elusive; the complex, overlapping, often mutually contradictory set of conceptual, legal, cultural, and personal meaning frames with which we use to define it seem to keep the problem tantalizingly beyond our analytic reach. What do we mean by “racially motivated crime”? Are all “racist incidents” motivated by hatred? How does racially motivated offending relate to “ordinary” prejudice and bigotry, to ignorance and fear of the unknown or unknowable? What do those who “terrorize and kill” have in common with those of us who do not?

Biography

David Gadd is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Manchester. He has years of experience conducting and analysing in-depth interview research and has written extensively on the subjects of domestic abuse, masculinities and crime, racial crime, racial harassment and desistance. He is currently collaborating with Professor Stephen Tomsen (UWS) on a project addressing Young Men’s Engagement and Disengagement from Violence, funded by the Australian Research Council.