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 is currently working on a three-year study entitled ‘Place, crime and insecurity in everyday life: A contemporary study of an English town’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The study – conducted with Evi Girlingand Gosia Polanska (Keele), Richard Sparks (Edinburgh), Ben Bradford (UCL) and Ryan Casey (Oxford) – 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 is revisiting 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).

Ian is also  working on a monograph with the working title of Ideologies in Crime Control  to be published by Oxford University Press. The book forms part of a long-term project Ian has pursued with Richard Sparks – termed A Better Politics of Crime - which is concerned with different dimensions of the relationship between crime control and democratic politics. Ian also continues to research and write on policing and private security.

Ian is Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice. He also serves on the Editoral Boards of Policing, International Political Sociology and Delito y Sociedad.

Ian is 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 and the politics of crime and justice.