Visiting Fellow: Professor Clifford Shearing, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Hosted By: Dr Julie Berg
Date of Visit: 10-19 April 2023
Purpose of Visit: The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR) is in the process of crafting a new inter-disciplinary research vision and agenda engaging with new global harms (climate change, and digital technologies, for instance). Prof. Shearing’s visit will contribute to this strategic development in terms of developing a programme of action in which the future of crime, harm and justice is reimagined. Prof. Shearing offers an excellent in-person PGR masterclass on writing a PhD (and post-PhD prospects), he will lead a PhD masterclass for PGRs within the subject area; and a masterclass on the future of criminology.
Bio: Professor Clifford Shearing leads the Global Risk Governance programme in the Public Law Department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He also holds Professorships at the Universities of Griffith, Montreal, Toronto and an appointment at the University of New South Wales as a Visiting Professorial Fellow.
He is a world-renowned criminologist and interdisciplinary scholar focused on global harms, security, and resilience and, is known as a ‘big thinker’ in criminology. He has, throughout his career, sought to reshape understandings of policing. He, with his collaborators, has coined terms such as “mass private property”, the “governance of security” and “nodal governance” that have become common parlance within the criminological lexicon. His analyses have been influential in developing "policing studies" as an area of enquiry beyond "police studies”. His current work is focused on reshaping the boundaries of criminological studies in ways that enable criminologists to engage with the shifts in the risk landscapes that are characterising the 21st Century.
Clifford has been actively engaged in enhancing the safety of people's lives through a variety of policy and other practical engagements across the globe — for example, in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. He co-authored the influential 1999 Patten Commission report on policing in Northern Ireland and co-authored a landmark 2014 report by the Council of Canadian Academies, commissioned by the Government of Canada, entitled Policing Canada in the 21st Century: New Policing for New Challenges. This report builds on early co-authored reports published by the Canadian Law Reform Commission on global developments in policing.