2026 Annual Plymouth Critical Criminology Conference – Rage Against the ‘Machines’: Feeling and Challenging Systems of Normalisation and Oppression

On 31st March 2026 by Mark Walters

Thursday 4 June 2026, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm BST, Plymouth, UK

 

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s figure of the feminist killjoy, this conference understands rage not as a failure of civility but as confirming evidence that something is wrong. The killjoy refuses the happiness scripts that sustain systems of domination, exposing how comfort, order, and common sense are secured through the silencing of anger and the normalisation of harm.

Within criminology, killjoy practices disrupt demands for neutrality and compliance, insisting that critical knowledge often emerges from being difficult, angry, and out of place. Rage, in this sense, becomes a method: a way of noticing the violence of machines that work best when they go unnoticed, unquestioned, and unchallenged. By ‘machines’ we refer not only to technological systems, but to the broader assemblages that structure and regulate social life.

These include institutional practices, bureaucratic routines, legal frameworks, conceptual categories, and social norms that produce compliance, marginalisation, and control while often presenting themselves as neutral, necessary, or inevitable.

Together, this conference seeks to ask:

What does rage reveal about contemporary systems of power, and how might it be mobilised to refuse, resist, and dismantle the machines that tell us to comply, obey, and accept violence in the name of order?

 

Find more information and book your place here: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/2026-annual-plymouth-critical-criminology-conference

This event will be taking place at Levinsky Room, Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK.