Professor Ian Loader

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology. He is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Ian is a Fellow of British Academy and the Royal Society for the Arts.

Ian is the author of numerous books, edited collections, theoretical and empirical papers, and works of public engagement on policing; private security; public sensibilities towards crime and justice; penal policy and culture; crime control and political ideologies, and the democratic purposes of criminology.

Ian's current work focuses of two projects, both of which are coalescing around aspects of environmental harm. He has recently completed fieldwork on a three-year study entitled ‘Place, crime and insecurity in everyday life’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and is now writing papers and a book based on the research.  The study – conducted with Evi Girling (Keele), Richard Sparks (Edinburgh) and Ben Bradford (UCL) – investigates how people living in one English town, Macclesfield in Cheshire, talk about and act towards a range of threats that they regard as impinging upon their safety (their personal bodily integrity, their property, their locality, their wider habitat). A theoretical prospectus for the study has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Criminology, in addition to papers in the British Journal of Criminology and Criminological Encounters. A summary of project findings can be found here. 

Ian is also developing a new line of research on criminology and the harms of automobility. A background article for this project has been published in the Annual Review of Criminology, as well as a brief paper on 15 minute cites and auto-freedom. The project seeks to use the car, and systems of automobility, as an object through which to explore what it means practice criminology in the midst of a climate breakdown. Further papers are planned. Ian is also teaching a new graduate seminar on ‘Criminology and the car’.