2016 Victoria Postgraduate Criminology Conference Program

CONTENTS Acknowledgement of Wurundjeri Country 2 Welcome 3 Location 4 Lunch and conference drinks 4 Note on cover image 4 Keynote speakers 5 Program 6 Abstracts 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF WURUNDJERI COUNTRY We acknowledge that this forum takes place on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nations. We pay our respects to the Elders, forebears and families of the Wurundjeri, and of all Indigenous peoples who now share this area. As we convene this event and welcome you to join us today, we acknowledge that our ability to do so is predicated in part the on historic and ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous peoples that have taken both place here on Wurundjeri land and across the country, including the exploitation of Indigenous land, resources, labour and culture. 2 WELCOME On behalf of the organising committee I would like to thank all speakers and attendees of the First Annual Victoria Criminology Postgraduate Conference. Your time, effort and support is greatly appreciated, and without your help this conference could not have taken place. Thank you. We would also like to give special thanks to those who have provided financial support for this event including the University of Melbourne’s Graduate Student Association, the University of Melbourne and Deakin University. This conference was developed in the spirit of bringing together the many criminology postgraduates of Victoria. We are fortunate to be currently experiencing a period of growth for criminology in Australia and it is only appropriate to create a framework for collaboration, integration and knowledge-sharing amongst the emerging generation of criminological researchers. There are so many exciting research projects happening across Victoria’s multiple excellent Universities, and it is great to be able to showcase this terrific crop of talent in one key event. We hope you all take the opportunity to find out what research is currently in development, and hopefully begin to build bridges of cooperation and research partnership. Working together serves to benefit us all and strengthen the broader prospects of criminology in Victoria. This event is only the beginning of a wider project to build an ongoing, sustainable network for Victoria’s criminology postgraduates. While this year’s event is brought to you primarily by the University of Melbourne and Deakin University this is only a launchpad arrangement. Hopefully in the future we can see greater involvement from the wider community of criminology departments across the state. Enjoy your day, and feel free to share your ideas for how next year’s conference can be even better! Regards, The 2016 Organising Committee Dr Diarmaid Harkin Lecturer in Criminology Deakin University Mark Wood PhD Candidate The University of Melbourne 3 LOCATION Panel sessions will take place in the William Macmahon Ball Theatre (Room 107) and the North Lecture Theatre (Room 239). Both theatres are located in the Old Arts Building at the University of Melbourne. LUNCH AND CONFERENCE DRINKS Lunch will be held at 1pm in the Arts Hall (Room 222), located on the first floor of the Old Arts Building. Following the keynote lecture, drinks will also be held in the Arts Hall, and all conference attendees are invited to attend. NOTE ON COVER IMAGES The front cover image of this program was photographed in Barcelona in 2016. While the graffiti depicted in this photo may be relatively clear in its initial message, its placement underneath a CCTV camera invites those who encounter it to engage further; is the artist protesting against surveillance in public spaces and what this may represent ideologically, or is it directed more so toward the installer/monitor of this particular camera? How agents may respond to – and potentially call for the removal of – this (likely unauthorised) public marking also offers further critique regarding the policing and aesthetic management of public space. The back cover image shows the construction of Ravenhall Prison in Ravenhall, Victoria. The medium security men’s prison, which will accommodate 1,000 prisoners, is due to be completed in late 2017. Both photos were uploaded to Seeing_Criminology, an Instagram profile established in 2016 by Caitlin Overington, a PhD Candidate in Criminology at the University of Melbourne. A collaborative page, the profile invites people to apply a critical lens to that which they encounter in cities on a daily basis so that a more robust discussion regarding crime and related policy may be had in public. Everyone is encouraged to participate in the conversation, and recommended to use #seeingcriminology to connect with others. 4 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Dr Kate Fitz-gibbon is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in School of Social Sciences at Monash University. Her research examines legal responses to lethal violence and the impact of homicide and sentencing law reform in the United Kingdom, Australia and elsewhere. Professor Mark Halsey is a Professor of Criminology in the School of Law, Flinders University, and co-author of the book Young Offenders: Crime, Prison and the Struggle to Desist. He currently holds a four-year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship examining the causes, experiences and consequences of intergenerational incarceration. Professor Andrew Goldsmith is Strategic Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Crime Policy and Research in the School of Law, Flinders University, Adelaide. His recent work has been on the impact of mobile phones and YouTube upon police visibility, the significance of social media use by police and co-offending among indigenous youth. Dr Andrew Groves is a Lecturer in Criminology at Deakin University. His research is primarily centred on the prevalence of methamphetamines in Australia, their use by young people, and the impact on Australian drug policy. He is also interested in correctional research, in terms of corruption and intergenerational patterns of incarceration. Dr Nicola Henry is a Senior Lecturer in Crime, Justice and Legal Studies at La Trobe University. She has written on a wide range of issues, with specific focus on sexual violence, law, power and justice. Her books include War and Rape: Law, Memory and Justice and Preventing Sexual Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Overcoming a Rape Culture (coedited with Anastasia Powell). Dr Wendy O’Brien is a Lecturer in Criminology at Deakin University. Her research focuses on the intersections between sexuality theory, feminism and human rights. She also conducts research on children’s rights, with a particular focus on the rights of children in conflict with the law. 5 PROGRAM PANEL ONE: POLICING William Macmahon Ball Theatre, 10:40am Panel Chair: Emma Ryan, Deakin University Police Memorialisation: Symbolic Representations, Memory and Police Legitimacy Chris Linke, Deakin University There are multi-faceted reasons for the construction of memorials to police officers killed while on duty. This presentation examines how police memorials, which are symbolic representations of policing, have proliferated in a time when it has been argued that police legitimacy is declining in Western democracies. Police legitimacy is influenced by tensions between the need for a publicly funded police force and public perceptions of discrepancies in how policing is conducted at the organisational level and by individual police personnel. Moreover, public police are no longer the sole providers of law and order. Police memorials have begun to appear in Australia as one possible affirmation of legitimacy within this context of competing modes and approaches to undertaking contemporary law enforcement. The paper will outline the nature of the relationship between public policing, legitimacy and memorialisation, by highlighting how police appropriate customs and traditions established in the field of war memory and commemoration. Mediatised Illusions of Police: Signal Crime & Significant Events Daniel Sormaz, Deakin University The link between media reporting and how its persuasive nature in dictating what society consider as important is well established. Citizens often judge and conclude on issues dependent on the focus, saturation, intensity and emphasis the press place on it. Media, through its selective reporting can influence how justice policies are constructed, as saturation of certain news reports not only has the scope to shape public opinion and sentiment it retains crime high on the political agenda which thus may influence policy change. Significant events, or “signal crimes” are scenarios where citizens contemplate the level of risk they are exposed to as a direct result of media reporting. This paper analyses the depiction of police, societal gender norms and saturation of media with aim to identify any salient concerns from the sample derived. This research compliments previous literature regarding signal crime where societal anxieties are propagated through media representations of criminogenic nature. Given the increasing interest of visual tools within criminology, the primary focus of this paper is the mediatised images of police pre and post a significant event. Criminologists often analyse on the media itself as opposed to the content of the image. This paper analyses the Lindt café siege in Sydney where a sample of images are analysed to ascertain whether there are differences in the mediatised narrative between the depiction of police pre and post event. The image sample indicates a masculine over representation of the New South Wales Police Force overall. Taking into consideration image analysis amongst criminologists is developing, especially the nexus of image and signal crime, this research concludes by suggesting future approaches to research that should aim to confluence between media written and image narratives of crime. Assessing the compliance of private security firms based upon observations of their compliance with minor laws. Matthew Box, Charles Sturt University In 2014 the Victoria Police released its Blue Paper A Vision for Victoria Police in 2025. One of the directions outlined in that paper was to develop ‘collaborate partnerships’ with private security providers. The same document indicated that private security companies have progressively taken over roles performed by government agencies either by contract to government or private institutions. Utilising observations over a twelvemonth period, this project has undertaken an analysis of private security operatives observation of minor laws – particularly those contained in the Road Safety Road Rules 2009 (Vic) – based upon the proposition that compliance with minor laws should be an indication as to their attitude with compliance with wider regulations of their function. Due to the very nature of this project there has been a focus on the cash delivery sector. Initial observations point to there being a systematic disregard for these rules with a view that they have an ‘entitlement’ to choose which they will obey. Observations have been met with a mixture of threats, intimidation and the invention of laws by individual security guards in an attempt to prevent observations in public spaces. This further calls into question the industries’ compliance. Understanding Social Network Analysis as a Tool for Crime Intelligence Morgan Burcher, Deakin University Over the past two decades an increasing number of researchers have applied Social Network Analysis (SNA) to various ‘dark’ networks. This body of research would suggest that SNA is capable of revealing significant insights into the dynamics of dark networks, including identifying critical nodes and unique approaches to disruption. However, there has so far been very little research into whether and how police and security 8 agencies can apply SNA in an operational context to realise these potential applications. This research aims to go some way toward advancing our knowledge of the potential operational applications of SNA by drawing on qualitative interviews with criminal intelligence analysts from a number of agencies in Australia. Interviews were conducted with experienced criminal intelligence analysts, including those who have used SNA as well as those who have not for various reasons. The paper aims to advance our knowledge of the operational context of criminal intelligence analysis through exploring the experiences of analysts and their understanding of SNA. It is argued that considerable work remains to be done to bridge the gap between research and practice in this field. PANEL TWO: CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY North Theatre, 11am Panel Chair: Bec Hiscock, The University of Melbourne What really works? A Comparison of Post-Release Service Delivery Models in Melbourne and New York City Sitthana Theerathitiwong, The University of Melbourne In recent years, a significant increase the female members of ethnic minority groups in the Australian and American custodial population has been observed. This growth in the incarceration leads to an increase in those returning into the community, and those accessing available post-release services upon their return. While existing literature on prisoner re-entry readily highlights the unique needs of these women, it largely does not delve into their detailed experiences, and how their interactions with post-release services influence these experiences. Drawing on narrative interviews conducted with formerly-incarcerated women and post-release support staff in Melbourne and New York City, this paper presents two distinct models of post-release service delivery: a Re-entry Community Model (RCM) and a Client Service Model (CSM). In the paper, key elements of the RCM and the CSM will be discussed – including funding resources, service delivery priorities, model culture, and responsibilities and expectations. Moreover, the experiences of formerlyincarcerated women accessing each of these models will also be presented. It is argued that the model of post-release service delivery can act to either alleviate or compound on the already-complex and unique challenges these women face when returning home from prison. 9 Justice Reinvestment in the UK: ‘Doing the Right Thing’ or an Economic Imperative? Kate Burns, Monash University Over the last decade, Justice Reinvestment has emerged as criminal justice policy in many locations across the USA. International interest in this concept is growing with preliminary work taking place in the UK and Australia. This paper will discuss findings from empirical research undertaken in the UK. Qualitative interviews were conducted in 2014 with participants involved in facilitating and operating the ‘Local Justice Reinvestment Pilot’ in Greater Manchester. Many Justice Reinvestment advocates highlight the social justice benefits of the concept and indeed many of the participants of this current study highlighted the need to ‘do the right thing’ rather than concentrating on the financial aspects of the program. However, this paper will demonstrate that the way crime and incarceration were problematised in Greater Manchester enabled an economic discourse to develop that did not allow a space for social justice considerations. This paper concludes that despite the consistent narrative of ‘doing the right thing’, governmental economic rationalities trumped any other logics behind operation of the program in Greater Manchester. Allowing Victims the Right to Review Prosecutorial Decisions: A Step Towards or Away from Meeting Victims’ Justice Needs? Mary Iliadis, Monash University Victims’ rights are integral to the prosecution process. Over the past three decades, significant changes to legal policies have attempted to locate victims as “integral players … rather than mere bystanders” in the prosecution process (O’Connell 2012: 1). As a result, we have seen a range of victim-focused reforms emerging that seek to redress procedural and substantive justice concerns. This is particularly so in relation to sexual assault cases, which have historically resulted in persistent victim dissatisfaction with, and alienation from, the prosecution process. More recently, several common law jurisdictions have moved somewhat contentiously, towards integrating victim participation rights within the prosecution process through reforms that offer legal representation to victims and the right to review prosecutorial discretion. This paper presents an analysis of the Victims’ Right to Review Scheme – the unique victim-focused reform introduced in England and Wales in 2013. To date, there has been no substantive research undertaken in this area to consider whether this reform is operating effectively or whether it takes victims’ procedural justice needs into account. Drawing from the limited quantitative data available on the scheme and in-depth interviews conducted with legal professionals, stakeholders and victim support workers, 10 this paper argues that despite seeking to increase the rights and status of victims in the prosecution process, the Victims’ Right to Review has not fully attended to victims’ procedural justice needs. Accordingly, it is not operating in the ways anticipated from the reform’s introduction. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PANEL: ADVICE FOR ASPIRING CRIMINOLOGISTS William Macmahon Ball Theatre, 12pm Panel: Kate Fitz-gibbon, Nicola Henry and Wendy O’Brien Panel Chair: Mathew Mitchell, The University of Melbourne In this Q&A style panel, three leading criminologists, Kate Fitz-gibbon, Nicola Henry and Wendy O’Brien, give advice on publishing, obtaining grants funding, and making the transition from from PhD candidate to lecturer. Drawing on their experiences as successful researchers and former PhD students, Kate, Nicola and Wendy will answer questions on how to succeed in today’s increasingly competitive scholarly environment. PANEL THREE: FAMILY AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE North Theatre, 2pm Panel Chair: Evelyn Rose, The University of Melbourne 11 No longer silent: South Sudanese Australian women speak of sexual violence during war. Sara Maher, The University of Melbourne My research addresses the lives of South Sudanese women who, having survived a genocidal war in Sudan (1983-2005), now reside in Australia as members of the country’s largest ‘new’ community of a refugee background. During recent fieldwork, nearly 20 percent of participants, without prompting, spoke directly and indirectly of sexual violence during war. These findings offer a contrast to recent research with South Sudanese women in other Diasporas (Tankink, 2013) where revelations of wartime sexual violence in front of family and community were absent or constrained. Referring to the work of Elaine Scarry (1985) and Sara Ahmed (2004), this paper explores how the women’s avowed sense of safety and security in Australia has allowed them to verbally objectify pain and create a vocabulary which describes their own narrative of injury. Family Violence, Gender and Masculinity; the Utility of Structural Approaches to Family Violence. William Arpke, The University of Melbourne Family violence is one of the most widespread and insidious forms of violence in modern society. Over the last four decades, feminist and pro-feminist, scholars and activists have made great advances in interrogating the role that gender plays in family violence. Despite this, narratives of family violence continue to represent it as an individual, interpersonal problem, cases of isolated offenders acting out in atypical ways. Moreover, research in family studies has typically centred on gender as a quality possessed by an individual, despite strong indications that there are structural and institutional elements to gender. Given the importance of family violence studies, particularly in light of the recent Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, this paper critically reviews existing literature in order to demonstrate that there are considerable benefits to applying structural feminist and pro-feminist understandings of gender to family violence studies. As a result of the gendered nature of family violence perpetrators, this paper will centre on the role of masculinity in relation to family violence. Moreover, it explores the importance of broadening understandings of family violence narratives from isolated, individual actors to take into account structural and institutional elements. This paper was written as part of a current honours research project investigating the role of men’s and women’s organisations in the Royal Commission into Family Violence and represents and attempt to highlight potential new directions within the field of criminology. 12 PANEL FOUR: CRIME, JUSTICE AND SOCIAL MEDIA William Macmahon Ball Theatre, 2pm Panel Chair: Bianca Fileborn, The University of Melbourne Cyber justice and sexual violence: Exploring victim-survivor stories on reddit Tully O’Neill, RMIT Victim-survivors often face difficulties in disclosing experiences of sexual violence. Frequently, fear of the consequences of disclosure or a perception that nothing will be done by authorities deters victim-survivors from pursuing justice in a formal setting. However, emerging research suggests that survivors are accessing ‘informal’ justice through use of technologies. Digital platforms, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social networking sites such as Reddit offer new ways for survivors to seek support and disclose experiences of sexual violence in anonymous and ‘safe’ online spaces. This paper explores the nature and content of victim-survivors’ posts on a publically available rape survivor forum on Reddit, titled /r/rapecounselling. Through content analysis, this research examines the ways that survivors interact with the forum. It explores whether survivors act in accordance with written (and unwritten) rules of online spaces, and what content on the forum becomes ‘popular’. Interactions between survivors on the forum are noted and form part of this analysis, along with an exploration of thematic patterns evident on the forum. Overall, this paper is part of preliminary research contributing to a doctoral project that explores how survivors using digital platforms understand ‘justice’. This paper contributes to knowledge on how and why survivors are engaging with digital technologies rather than the justice system. Skirting Around the Issue: The discursive construction of upskirting within Australian media and political discourses Chrissy Thompson, The University of Melbourne Upskirting – covertly photographing a person’s genital or anal region, often to distribute the footage online – is frequently neglected as a form of serious online sexual predation against women. This behaviour has occurred for centuries, and while its form has changed with the advent of smart phones and the internet, it has remained a pervasive and insidious harm against women. Drawing on my doctoral research this paper presents findings from a discourse analysis of the Victorian parliamentary debates relating to the Summary Offences Amendment (Upskirting) Bill 2007, and a sample of Australian media reports on upskirting over a 10-year period between 2005-2015. In this 13 paper, I analyse the discursive construction of upskirting and identify three recurring themes that a) represent this behaviour as a harmless or victimless crime; b) only portray the behaviour as an invasion of privacy, and c) normalise harmful sexist ideology relating to gendered violence. I contend that upskirting is another example of how online spaces can facilitate violence against women, and that the ways in which it has been represented has simultaneously obscured, denied and contributed to the harm this behaviour can engender. It is imperative that in addition to understanding the nature of new technologically facilitated harms such as upskirting, scholars should also examine and challenge problematic popular representations of these new harms, so that a broader audience might also ‘rethink’ cybercrime. Fight pages, curated affray and the rise of antisocial media Mark Wood, The University of Melbourne In its relatively short history, the popular social networking website Facebook has received considerable criticism for its ostensibly permissive stance towards violent content. Whilst much of this criticism has been directed towards the presence of extremely graphic violent material on the site (including, most notably, recordings of beheadings), Facebook’s permissive attitude towards violent material has also seen the growth of user-generated pages dedicated to curating more quotidian forms of violence. Among these are fight pages: user generated Facebook pages dedicated to hosting recordings of street fights and other forms of public violence. Drawing on observational data collected from five prominent fight pages and a survey of 205 fight page users, in this paper I contend that fight pages represent an emergent social media facilitated phenomenon that may be termed antisocial media: participatory video sharing websites and social media pages that aggregate, publicly host, and sympathetically curate footage of criminalized acts. Through analyzing the curated affray and technological form of fight pages, this paper elaborates on the phenomenon of antisocial media and sketches out their implications for the distribution and spectatorship of recordings of crime. Specifically, I argue that (anti)social media have profoundly democratized the distribution of footage of crime, and in doing so, have provided counter-publics where dominant discourses on criminalized acts can be collectively circumvented or challenged. On fight pages, this is evidenced through administrator and user authored discourses on street fighting that elide the criminalized nature of this behaviour in many jurisdictions, and instead construct it as an unregulated sport. Ultimately, I argue that antisocial media represent counter-publics where criminalized acts are curated and framed not as formal deviance, but rather as normative behaviours and entertainments. 14 PANEL THREE: STATE CRIME North Theatre, 2pm Panel Chair: Jarrett Blaustein, Monash University Pushing back ‘Intruders’: Bangladesh’s Rohingya Refugee Policy and State Crime Rashaam Chowdhury, The University of Melbourne Despite the significant amount of research on refugee refusal from the Global North, very little is known about policies emanating from the Global South. This thesis explores refugee refusal policies of the developing world utilising a tripartite state crime model. Using Bangladesh as a case study, thematic textual analysis of government rhetoric was carried out. The findings demonstrate that the Bangladeshi government’s rhetoric constructed Rohingya refugees as a ‘deviant’ group who were a ‘problem’ for the country. This resulted in popular support for repressive policies being initiated to prevent the Rohingya from entering Bangladesh. By applying the tripartite framework to these policies, the research has demonstrated that Bangladesh’s actions may be labelled as state crime in juridical, organisational deviance and social harm levels. It concludes by recognising that the tripartite model offers a more nuanced understanding of state crime in general, and recommends this model to be used for examining refugee refusal strategies of other countries — particularly in the Global South. There is nothing Humanitarian about Humanitarian Intervention Lisa Di Battista, The University of Melbourne The international legal framework for humanitarian intervention is in need of reevaluation to become more humanitarian in character. The notions of selectivity of response and that it a new form of imperialism are a few important reasons why to date humanitarian intervention as a practice can be considered imperfect. Selectivity of response can be a consequence of self-interested nature of states, ambiguity in criteria for humanitarian intervention, hierarchy structure of international crimes and also bias between countries. Humanitarian intervention as a new form of imperialism as considered in many influential works in the last decade, allow an element of control from 'western' democracies. Consequently, humanitarian intervention may be considered inadequate in response to serious internal conflict within states as a means to prevent or cease human rights abuses. In this presentation, the Rwandan genocide will be used along with these considerations to highlight why there is nothing humanitarian about humanitarian intervention. The paper will also propose two changes 15 to international law that may assist the international community in providing not only a more legitimate basis for interaction, but one which has the capacity to be more humanitarian. These changes direct the focus towards war theory and the removal of the need for continuous policing by western democracies under the United Nations Charter. PANEL SIX: TROUBLING IMAGES William Macmahon Ball Theatre, 3pm Panel Chair: Claire Opperman, The University of Melbourne Authenticating Image Practices: Digitality and the Uneasy Category of Image. Thomas Andrews, The University of Melbourne Within the idioms of cultural criminology, there is a strong vein of scholarship concerned with “the image”. This paper is prompted by an increasing ill-ease with this category and how it structures an analysis of tools, processes and texts. I read a short example of changes to rules of the World Press Photography awards that attempt to deal with the vexed issue of photographic authenticity in the era of Photoshop, RAW files and the algorithmic interaction of light and software. My suggested approach to understand a shift from text to procedure draws on recent scholarship in media studies as well as Science and Technology Studies in order to situate a redescription of the problem of authenticity in the context of claims about truth and happening. The shift from chemical based processes and objects to digital works flows has changed something fundamental about the category of image. Un-blackboxing the camera might start to provide us with some tools for thinking critically about claims of truth, authenticity or subjectivity as they emerge in their myriad criminological contexts. Unclear images, unsettled cities: examining the influence of CCTV footage. Caitlin Overington, The University of Melbourne Closed-circuit television cameras are firmly fixed within the architecture of many modern cities. While often disappearing into the background of the urban environment in the everyday context, CCTV footage continues to amplify when this everyday-ness is ruptured by deviance. Images recorded by these fixed cameras are carefully sutured 16 together – either by police or news media – and are released as part of a narrative of making sense of crime in the city. This crime image, through its composition and imperfect framing of the space, has a multitude of effects. Through a selection of case studies and interviews, this paper will draw out how a relatively banal surveillance technology continues to have a profound impact on the everyday. This will be framed within relational visibility. Firstly, this paper will critically engage with the normative assumption that expanding CCTV networks will result in expanding spaces of order. Particularly when recording at night, the image created by these cameras instead projects the city as unsettled, with ever-present elements of darkness and risk that cannot be mitigated with more cameras. In other words, CCTV images expand the scene of the crime spatially and temporally through its circulation. This leads to the paper’s second assertion, which argues how this visibly ‘imperfect’ functionality of CCTV works more broadly in favour of expanding surveillance practices. Post-criminal events, CCTV returns to the background of the city, but not before contributing indirectly to the narrative of surveillance in general as simultaneously critical to, yet not invasive of, the everyday. Image management and mobile bodies: Aesthetic discipline and the politics of cleanliness. James Petty, The University of Melbourne Mobile services targeting homeless people are becoming increasingly common, both in Melbourne’s urban landscape and in the broader service delivery field. These social enterprises offer a range of services including haircuts, laundry services, access to showers and buses to sleep in. All of these services operate on the premise of mobile delivery: going to clients instead of making clients coming to them. Those behind the services have been publicly lauded for their charitable work and social vision: the founders of Orange Sky Laundry won the 2016 Young Australian of the Year award. However, this emerging space of social enterprise in the broader economy of welfare delivery prompts various questions. Specifically, what is motivating the emergence of this new space of welfare delivery, what is the role of the state and what responsibilities does it have for the homeless, and where do the objectives and desires of people experiencing homelessness fit in these new arrangements? This paper offers a speculative critique of these services, situating them within broader practices of urban image maintenance, incapacitation of transient bodies and the aesthetic regulation of visible poverty. Engaging with critical theories of the state, nomadism and representation, this paper speculatively traces out emerging arrangements of decentralising state power and the aesthetic disciplining of problematic, yet importantly non-criminal, bodies. 17 KEYNOTE LECTURE: DEVELOPING A RESEARCH PROJECT: TWO CASE STUDIES Professor Mark Halsey, Flinders University Professor Andrew Goldsmith, Flinders University Dr Andrew Groves This presentation highlights the design issues associated with two distinct studies. The first focuses on background work for our recently completed book on correctional corruption (which stemmed from strategic-applied work for the Western Australian Corruption and Crime Commission), and the second highlights some of the design and (ongoing) fieldwork challenges of our ARC funded study of gun violence. The first case will illustrate the research opportunities that can grow out of quite tightly specified contract research briefs. The second case will deal with a more 'blue sky' research opportunity that is also of considerable policy importance. 18 19