Martin Tansey Memorial Lecture 2024 - Women and the Criminal Justice System: Gender Matters
ACJRD is grateful to Maggie O’Neill, Professor in Sociology & Criminology, University College Cork, who presented the 17th Annual Martin Tansey Memorial Lecture, “Women and the Criminal Justice System: Gender Matters” in the Criminal Courts of Justice on Thursday, 2 May 2024.
The lecture drew upon a long history of research with women who come into conflict with the law, who engage with the criminal justice system as victims or offenders. In keeping with Martin Tansey’s life’s work and the values he promoted that underpin independent criminal justice research, the lecture highlighted the usefulness of interdisciplinarity and creative methods for centring the narratives of the actors involved and developing pathways to better knowledge and understanding, education and reintegration.
Biography
Maggie O’Neill is Professor in Sociology & Criminology at University College Cork and Director of ISS21, Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century and UCC Futures: Collective Social Futures. She is an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2023. Before joining UCC she was Chair in Sociology & Criminology in the Department of Sociology at the University of York, and Professor in Criminology at the University of Durham and Principal of Ustinov College. She describes herself as an inter-disciplinary scholar.
Maggie’s PhD in Sociology explored the transformative possibilities for conducting feminist participatory action research with sex workers and was awarded in 1996. The majority of the empirical research she has conducted uses participatory action research, ethnographic and biographical methods and participatory arts. She has a long history of working with artists and community groups to conduct arts based research-working together to create change; social justice is at the core of her work. Further information on Maggie O’Neill can be found here.