ECPR SGOC: 2ND GENERAL CONFERENCE ON ORGANISED CRIME
7-8 JULY 2017, BATH, UK

University of Bath

Website: https://ecpr.eu/Events/EventDetails.aspx?EventID=117

The ECPR Standing Group on Organised Crime was established in 2001 and has almost 100 members. The Standing Group on Organised Crime (SGOC) promotes research on organised crime across disciplinary, regional and professional boundaries. To this end, it offers a number of platforms such as its own website, a blog, and diverse social media.

After the success of the first General Conference on Organised Crime, which was held in Naples from 11-12 December 2015, this edition of the conference has the main theme of ‘Organised Crime Today: Networks, Routes and Criminal Partnerships’. This conference is organised in cooperation with the ECPR, the ECPR Standing Group on Organised Crime and the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath.

The study of serious and organised crime has allowed a better understanding of many illicit activities including; drug trafficking, smuggling, political corruption, and extortion, as well as improving social-economic policies and policing responses. By developing case studies, research methods, and theoretical frameworks we are closer to tackling these social problems that are challenging democratic institutions in many different ways and levels. However, despite the advances over the last 30 years, we are also starting to realise that we need to go beyond our traditional and well established frameworks to un-package the complex and silent features of serious and organised crime. The reason is simple: criminal networks do not operate in isolation. They exist in a multiplex networked world where changes in one layer of the social or economic fabric enables new structures and activities at another layer, and vice versa. Identifying the overlapping relationships of outwardly disconnected spheres of social interaction is a major research puzzle this conference wishes to address. #sgoc17

Exhibition “The Domitiana, Everyday Organized Crime and Life: Sounds and Images from a Road-A Photographic Experience” 

by Giovanni Izzo ran during the ECPR SGOC Second Conference in Bath.

The exhibition was part of the Faculty Research Arcade series – an initiative to profile in stand-out ways the ways in which Humanities & Social Sciences research makes an impact.

Exhibition duration: July 7-12, 2017

This is a photographic experience of images and sounds by the photographer, Giovanni Izzo of the road, the Domitiana, where life takes place in all its different forms. Once a major Roman road of historical and archaeological significance, La Domitiana is now home to the exploitative activities of organised crime and the increasingly urgent migrant crisis.

From this road, Giovanni Izzo’s panorama does not trim down, nor make an appeal or stop, but recounts and gives voice to many stories that everyone thought were forgotten: prostitution, widespread crime, improper construction works, illegal immigration and organised crime are captured in the black and white photographs, which thus display all the dramatic force of the social context in this area. The photos provide glimpses of the African underworld, the Camorra, crime and corruption, endemic and migrant poverty. They depict with honesty, but with poetic sadness, the landscape of poverty, suffering and dilapidation, produced and nourished by illegal activities. They document this and stir our emotions. They are accounts, stories and works of art.

Read Newsweek’s exclusive preview of the exhibition.

Source of the images: https://twitter.com/UniofBath/status/883232691944132608