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Please note that this event will be recorded, if you do not wish to be part of the recording, please feel free to turn your cameras off once the talk begins. The talk will be made available on the Criminology website and YouTube channel at a later date.
Registration closes at midday on Wednesday 25 February. The Teams link will be sent to you that afternoon.
The paper explores the idea of public order as an affective atmosphere, upon which sovereignty persists. The problem with studying public order is that we only tend to notice it when it is disturbed by riots, protests, bar fights, harassment or intimidation. We tend not to notice what the police call ’normality’. However, the different affective constellations of normality are crucial to understand. The paper explores one significant attempt to differentiate the feelings of ‘normal’, undertaken by police forces in the UK, from the 1980s until the present day. The dynamics of ‘community tension monitoring' helps us understand the ways in which the affect atmospheres of public order are constructed as an object of police knowledge. It also opens a key question about liberal (individualistic) understandings of surveillance, and the capacity of human rights to effectively respond.
Illan Wall is Associate Head of School at the University of Galway. He joined Galway in 2024 from the University of Warwick, where he was a Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Legal Studies. He is author and editor of various books (including Law and Disorder (2021) and The Critical Legal Pocketbook (2021)). He is an editor of the blog criticallegalthinking.com ; the open access publisher Counterpress.org.uk; the journal Law & Critique, and of the series Critical Perspectives of Law, Culture and Justice at Bristol University Press. In 2024, he founded the Irish Network of Legal Observers with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.
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