Ian Loader

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology and Professorial Fellow of All Souls College. 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 six books, including Public Criminology?  (Routledge, 2010, with Richard Sparks), and six edited volumes, including Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration (with Albert Dzur and Richard Sparks, Oxford UP, 2016) and The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing (with Ben Bradford, Bea Jauregui and Jonny Steinberg, 2016). Ian has 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 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).

In the mid-1990s, three members of the research team addressed earlier versions of these questions through a study of people's fears and feelings towards crime and social order in Macclesfield in Cheshire. The outcomes of this work were published in a book, Crime and Social Change in Middle England (2000). The team has revisited Macclesfield, a quarter of a century later, to undertake a new study of people's everyday experiences of in/security against the backdrop of rapid social, political and technological change (notably, the digital revolution, migration, austerity, and Brexit). A theoretical prospectus for the study has recently been published in the Oxford Handbook of Criminology. You can her Ian talk about the findings of the study here

Ian is also  developing a new line of research (and teaching) on ‘Criminology and the car’ – an early outcome of this work can be found here. He also continues to work on different dimensions of the relationship between crime control, political ideologies and democratic politics.

Ian is Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice.

Ian has recently been a member a member of the Advisory Board for the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales and of the Research Advisory Board of the Canada/Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission.

Ian supervises doctoral students working on the sociology of policing and security. He is particularly keen to work with students focused on everyday in/securities, automobility and criminology and the politics of crime and justice.