@BSC #HCNet Speakers’ Series: 2025/2026

Presentation: Historical criminology and collective memory: New directions

• Historical criminologists have emphasised the role of collective memory in shaping collective emotions and actions. However, the concept has been relatively neglected in criminological research and is mainly used in the context of trauma, intergroup conflict, and hostility. Perhaps this can be accounted for by the view that collective memory merely provides explicit, symbolic resources for the identity construction of groups in the form of shared representations of historical events, monuments, stories, and the like. Nevertheless, memory studies have moved beyond this narrow interpretation of collective memory by studying those implicit processes that shape the life of a collective unnoticed. This paper explores the criminological relevance of this new line of research.

Presentation Abstract: “No Pain nor Punishment Can Shake Him”: Blackness, Climate, and Criminality in A Treatise on Tropical Diseases by Benjamin Moseley

• A Treatise on Tropical Diseases (1792) by Benjamin Moseley, a British colonizer who practiced medicine in Jamaica, infamously claimed that climate determines the purported differentiated nature of racialized populations. Moseley depicted Blackness as more indolent, emotionally impulsive, and sexually aggressive due to the supposedly feverish influence of tropical heat and numbing “sameness of seasons.” Yet, the physician also affirmed the following conflicting portrait of Blackness: “A lie once determined on, no pain nor punishment can shake him.” The premeditated discursive ambivalence between emotional erraticism and a calculated and “unshakable” criminality fuels the escalating crossing of medical racism and the imperial carceral landscape during the late eighteenth century. This presentation explores the discourses about Blackness, criminality, and tropical climate in Moseley’s medical treatise, paying close attention to intersectional depictions of criminality in the context of enslaved childbirth and denouncing its long-lived, devastating legacies within the Atlantic history of environmental injustice.

Presentation: Murder and Masculinity in a 1920 South East Queensland Timber Cutter’s encampment

• This paper examines an alleged homosexual advance that led to a killing and an attempt to conceal the crime in a small timber cutters camp near the settlement of Cooyar in Southeast Queensland in 1920.   By examining the history and circumstances surrounding this crime including the investigation and subsequent trial the paper provides a view into the prevailing social mores of the time.  Importantly it examines how justifications for the protection of masculinity from homosexual advances informally referred to as the ‘unspeakable’ crime was accommodated in the criminal justice syste

Presentation: What Indigenous Deaths in Custody Can Tell Us About Genocide

• What can Indigenous deaths in custody, excessive by any measure and in all settler colonies, tell us about genocide? In this presentation,  I reflect on my own scholarship on Indigenous deaths in custody, examining what I identify as the reparative thrust of settler colonialism (improvement) in Canada. I reflect on how the reparative gesture – as revealed in inquests and inquiries into Indigenous deaths in custody—is a necessary component of settler colonialism’s inner core, namely the elimination of the native. If the violence of settler colonialism is obscured by the state’s performance of benevolent concern, and all the while a slow genocide continues apace, engaging in a reparative rather than an abolitionist politics only hastens the elimination of the native. The reparative thrust, however, is generally muted or absent altogether in settler colonies that have not transitioned from openly eliminationist to democratic regimes. How might we consider law in these various stages of settler colonialism?