THE HUMAN WRECKAGE OF NEO-LIBERALISM: A SOCIAL HARM PERSPECTIVE

This fellowship will seek to develop social science’s understanding of socially mediated harm.

A natural starting point for this analysis is a critique of existing approaches to the study of harm. To date, criminology has been the discipline most closely aligned to the issue of socially mediated harm. However, criminology’s analysis of harm has been severely circumscribed because of its proximity to the criminal law. This has resulted in the discipline’s obsessive concern with the acts of individuals, who are primarily drawn from society’s most socio-economically disadvantaged groups. As critical criminology has correctly noted, mainstream criminology’s focus has been at the expense of a study of other harms perpetuated by corporations and state actors. Consequently, there has been an emerging interest amongst critical scholars in the concept of social harm as a tool to map the vicissitudes of capitalist society.

Thus, an aim of this award is to continue to develop an alternative normative framework – detached from dominant legal discourses – that identifies the specific ways in which human well-being is compromised by the relations of capitalist society. A further aim of the award will be to understand the ideological devices that have served to legitimate these harms.

Funder: Economic and Social Research Council Post Doctoral Fellowship.