VCU Media Lab

We propose the establishment of a VCU Media Lab – a professional creative media technology unit whose mission is to support the development, design, production and delivery of innovative media, multimedia, computer-based instruction, publications and tools in support of VCU education, research and marketing initiatives. This centrally administered, budgeted and resourced facility will acknowledge, refine, focus and expand media services that are currently being provided at VCU in a decentralized manner

Community experiences of organised crime in Scotland

The research explored community experiences of serious organised crime in Scotland (SOC). The report provides information on the nature and extent of the impact of SOC on everyday life in the community, as well as offering suggestions for policy development. The study sought to answer the following questions: 1)What are the relationships that exist between SOC and communities in Scotland? 2)What are the experiences and perceptions of residents, stakeholders and organisations of the scope and nature of SOC within their local area? and 3)How does SOC impact on community wellbeing, and to what extent can the harms associated with SOC be mitigated

Visibility and the Policing of Public Space

From studies of ‘panoptic’ CCTV surveillance to accounts of undercover police officers, it is often mooted that visibility and invisibility are central to the policing of public space. However, there has been no comprehensive and critical assessment of this axiom. Drawing on the practices of a variety of policing providers and regulators, and the work of geographers, criminologists and other social scientists, this paper examines how and why visibility underpins the policing of public space. We begin by considering the ways in which policing bodies and technologies seek to render themselves selectively visible and invisible in the landscape. The paper then moves on to explore the ways in which policing agents attempt to make ‘incongruous’ bodies, behaviours and signs variously visible and invisible in public space. We then offer a sympathetic critique of these accounts, arguing that more attention is needed in understanding: (i) how other senses such as touch, smell and sound are socially constructed as in and out-of-place and ‘policed’ accordingly; and (ii) how the policing of undesirable bodies and practices is not simply about quantitative crime reduction, but conducted through qualitative, embodied performance. The paper concludes by pinpointing key areas for future research

Fearsquare: hacking open crime data to critique, jam and subvert the 'aesthetic of danger'

We present a critical evaluation of a locative media application, Fearsquare, which provocatively invites users to engage with personally contextualized risk information drawn from the UK open data crime maps cross-referenced with geo-located user check-ins on Foursquare. Our analysis of user data and a corpus of #Fearsquare discourse on Twitter revealed three cogent appraisals ('Affect', 'Technical' and 'Critical') reflecting the salient associations and aesthetics that were made between different components of the application and interwoven issues of technology, risk, danger, emotion by users. We discuss how the varying strength and cogency of these public responses to Fearsquare call for a broader imagining and analysis of how risk and danger are interpreted; and conclude how our findings reveal important challenges for researchers and designers wishing to engage in projects that involve the computer-mediated communication of risk

Report of the Open Working Group of the General Assembly on Sustainable Development Goals

This report is an integrated and coordinated implementation of and follow-up to the outcomes of the major United Nations conferences and summits in the economic, social and related fields

Generic Personal Safety Applications; empowering victims of Domestic Violence and Abuse? A Practitioner Lens

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Bespoke and generic Domestic Violence and Abuse (DVA) Personal Safety Applications (PSAs) have become a popular choice for strategic crime prevention projects by those in the criminal justice sector; to achieve justice through digital means as part of the wider digital justice project. These PSAs have been heralded as tools for the protection, empowerment, and resilience building of victims in DVA, despite limited independent evaluations. This article explores the use of a generic PSA, which the police have adopted for rollout to victims of DVA in one region of the United Kingdom. We undertook a thematic analysis of data taken from a roundtable and three follow up focus groups with practitioners from the police, criminal justice, DVA specialist sector, and victim services, alongside the PSA development team. We found both some support for using this PSA and serious concerns regarding its use in DVA situations