(Professor of Sociology, University of Kent)

I am interested in processes of social inclusion and exclusion , how this relates to the phenomenon of othering and the way this plays out in the late modern period. So this involves me in studying moral panics, deviancy amplification, moral indignation and the punitive turn. I am particularly interested in how these processes of essentialisation and dehumanisation can lead people to excessive violence in the areas of terrorism and conventional warfare. Such concerns link quite closely to cultural criminology and an interest in an existentially informed sociology.

Past Research: Among the areas that I have carried out research in are mass media , drugs, abortion, policing, criminal victimization, stop and search and ethnic minorities. My early research involved an ethnographic study of drug use in Notting Hill but I have been also involved in a series of local crime and policing surveys for various local authorities.

Selected Books: My personal favourites are:

• The Drugtakers 1971
• The New Criminology 1973 (with I. Taylor and P. Walton)
• The Manufacture of News 1981 (with S. Cohen)
• What's to be Done About Law and Order? 1984 (with J. Lea)
• Rethinking Criminology: The Realist Debate 1992 (with R. Matthews)
• The Exclusive Society 1999

I have also just finished The Vertigo of Late Modernity (London: Sage), a sequel to my 1999 book The Exclusive Society. I am now working on two new books: Cultural Criminology: An Invitation (with Jeff Ferrell and Keith Hayward) and The Criminological Imagination (Oxford: Polity).