Ian Loader

Professor Ian Loader

Mid-Career Fellow 2016-17

In Search of a Better Politics of Crime

This project works at the curiously under-explored interface between criminology and political theory with the aim of developing the intellectual tools and resources needed to fashion a better politics of crime. Using theories of ideology and work in the history of ideas in novel ways, the study aims to understand crime control via an analysis of the political concepts that are at issue (justice, authority, freedom etc.); as an inescapable site of ideological conflict and change, and as a field of policy and practice constituted through political thinking.

More information

Research outcomes

Loader, I. (2020).

Crime, order and the two faces of conservatism: An encounter with criminology’s other. The British Journal of Criminology, 60(5), 1181-1200.

Loader, I. (2020).

A Question of Sacrifice: The Deep Structure of Deaths in Police Custody. Social & Legal Studies, 29(3), 401-420.

Farrall, S., Goldson, B., Loader, I., & Dockley, A. (Eds.). (2016).

Justice and Penal Reform: Re-shaping the Penal Landscape (1st ed.). Routledge.

Areas of interest

Criminology Criminal Justice Justice Prisons Incarceration Policing Security Crime Criminalisation

Cohort

MCF3

Biography

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology and Professorial Fellow of All Souls College. Ian arrived in Oxford in July 2005 having previously taught at Keele University and the University of Edinburgh, from where he also obtained his PhD in 1993. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

Ian is the author of six books, the most recent of which Public Criminology? was published by Routledge in 2010 (with Richard Sparks) and has recently been translated into Mandarin. He has also edited six volumes, including Justice and Penal Reform (with Barry Goldson, Steve Farrall and Anita Dockley, Routledge, 2016), Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration (with Albert Dzur and Richard Sparks, Oxford UP, September 2016 ) and The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing (with Ben Bradford, Bea Jauregui and Jonny Steinberg) which is due to appear in July 2016. Ian has also published theoretical and empirical papers on policing, private security, public sensibilities towards crime, penal policy and culture, the politics of crime control, and the public roles of criminology. Ian is Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice.

Biographical details correct as of 13.03.26