About Us
The Centre for Criminology Law and Justice (CCLJ) is the place for responsive, rigorous, and grounded criminological and critical legal research. We are critical criminologists, legal and social justice driven scholars doing research that is community connected and social justice oriented. We address entrenched structural justice issues with our sustained focus on decolonisation, decriminalisation, defunding, harm reduction and countering gendered and sexual violence.
Driven by a commitment to more just futures, CCLJ research is diverse, interdisciplinary and decolonising. As such it is situated in the spaces between existing laws, the criminal justice system and elusive justice outcomes. Our thinking is bold, our research grounded in communities and our vision for social change is expansive and global.
Social justice issues like austerity, mass imprisonment, growing economic inequality, war, settler colonial violence, mass people movements, unemployment, ecological destruction, slavery, exploitation make it necessary for criminologists and legal scholars to be responsive to calls for justice when are at their loudest. At CCLJ we take expansive, interdisciplinary, critical and creative approaches to what appear to be intractable justice issues. This is urgent when prevailing approaches to economic inequalities, health disparities, disability, racial and gender injustices have not delivered social justice. On the contrary these approaches amplify harms experienced by marginalised communities. Our criminological and critical legal scholarship offers new ways of conceptualising, seeing, talking about and bringing more just futures into being.