Short Abstract:

This panel explores how participatory action research challenges traditional academic narratives of crime and deviance, offering decolonial and activist perspectives that empower communities. By unwriting hegemonic narratives, we focus on collaboration in the co-construction of community resilience.

Long Abstract:

In a globalized era, local communities face complex crime and deviance challenges, such as human trafficking, cybercrime, radicalization, and security politics that privilege fear, surveillance, and suspicion. These transnational issues often erode social ties and cultural cohesion, making communities more vulnerable and tending towards individualization. This panel employs the concept of unwriting to question dominant academic paradigms about crime, insecurity, and the meanings of ‘the community’. We examine how participatory action research (PAR) and interdisciplinary collaborations can empower communities by re-centering situated knowledge, cultural practices, and storytelling as tools for resilience and creating new alternative narratives about crime, violence, and resistance.

By adopting a decolonial or activist lens, this panel confronts the unseen, unheard, and untold practices of community resistance in contexts of violence, crime and insecurity. We explore how unwriting – the undoing of established academic narratives – allows for a more inclusive and material engagement with communities affected by global crime. In doing so, we challenge the narratives imposed by surveillance, algorithmic control, and self-censorship, creating space for alternative, multi-sensual research practices.

The panel invites scholars to explore how PAR and collaboration facilitate unwriting by elevating community voices, particularly those traditionally marginalized. We seek to build a network of interdisciplinary researchers committed to rewriting the dominant scripts of crime and deviance through the lens of local knowledge, fostering empowerment and social healing. This approach reflects a conscious departure from hegemonic academic traditions, creating new possibilities for collaborative, community-driven research.

This Panel has so far received 3 paper proposal(s).
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