Pleased to share the 2nd publication from my MSc dissertation, conducted at @oxfordcrim.bsky.social but honed at @cambcriminology.bsky.social . This paper theorises nature and generativity of parole punitivity grounded in comparative penology journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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Materiality and production can’t be bracketed from emancipatory politics of AI. Especially when the AI-vangelists try very hard to occlude the same @criticalai-journal.bsky.social

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Code can be forked overnight; fabrication plants can’t. Javier Serrano, Nicholas Gates and Johan Linåker argue Europe’s tech sovereignty push stops at software—and that real independence means opening up hardware too, not just the code that runs on it.

Code can be forked overnight; fabrication plants can’t. Javier Serrano, Nicholas Gates and Johan Linåker argue Europe’s tech sovereignty push stops at software—and that real independence means opening up hardware too, not just the code that runs on it.

Without Open-Source Hardware, There Is No EU Tech Sovereignty

Javier Serrano, Nicholas Gates, and Johan Linåker make the case for focusing on open-source hardware and the design layer in Europe's tech sovereignty strategy.

buff.ly

I fail to understand the paradigmatic claims in criminology: “we now live in a risk society” (there are other mechanisms in play as well + risk did not germane in the 90s); “we are in ultramodern society” (I thought we were in risk society! What is “ultramodern”?)

It was so much fun organising this conference. The future of critical criminology is in great hands

Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge@cambcriminology.bsky.social · 3mo ago

At the Criminology PhD Conference on 28-29 April, PhD researchers came from across the world to discuss how criminology can confront global injustices. Using both research papers and presentations, they touched on subjects ranging from colonialism to violence. www.crim.cam.ac.uk/news/annual-...

Yesterday, I presented a part of my doctoral project at a seminar at @cambcriminology.bsky.social It felt very special to finally share some of the fruits of my labour with peers, mentors, and colleagues in the field. Next stop: @bschcnetwork.bsky.social conference

Felt great to present fruits of my PhD research at Institute of Criminology, Cambridge’s PhD conference. Both my theory and humour were well received. So much more to come, I’m so excited.

It’s never restricted to “verification”. Learn from India: modularisation and modulation are bedfellows. Verification is a smokescreen for dehumanising, tokenising, and assetising of being

Xander Lenc@xlenc.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Surely this will solve the central administrative problem here, rather than unleash an entirely new class of carceral horrors in the UK. www.bbc.com/news/article...

it's become so hard to do quick web searches about events that aren't in the immediate past. I feel like I need to develop some kind of news article library or notetaking system

#OpenAccess in the February issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (@jocn.bsky.social): Context Matters: Human Faces Hinder Face Pareidolia

Context Matters: Human Faces Hinder Face Pareidolia

Abstract. The human visual system readily processes illusory faces (IFs) as faces, a phenomenon known as face pareidolia. Building on evidence that IF processing elicits face-like neural activity and…

direct.mit.edu

Actor-Network Theory (as per criminologists)

Just read an article in @theoreticalcrim.bsky.social that has completely misattributed and misinterpreted Deleuze, and re-signified concepts without sufficient reason. Don’t even get me started on argumentative flaws. Sad to see this on our discipline’s only theoretical journal

UK is getting its Aadhar

TL;DR: Verizon is being held accountable for unlawfully tracking and selling customer location data without proper disclosure or consent, raising serious privacy concerns.

Verizon Remains On The Legal Hook For Illegally Spying On You And Selling Your Movement Data (For Now)

For decades, major U.S. wireless providers have collected sensitive customer movement and location data (often down to the meter), then sold it to a long list of random dipshits — usually without b…

techdirt.com

The silence of certain immigration scholars on Far Right marches, rise of Reform and its policies, and everyday embodied harms of migrantphobia is alarming and concerning. Pick a side, speak up, before it’s too late. Don’t compel us to expose your duplicity and hypocrisy.

My fieldwork has now brought me to Hyderabad, where I am conducting research with India’s most technologically advanced police force. I look forward to developing a deeper, more contextually grounded understanding of the social life of algorithmic evidence in criminal investigations and prosecutions

As part of my PhD fieldwork, I have joined Bureau of Police Research & Development - India’s state-owned policing think tank. I’ll be working as a research assistant for Tech & Modernisation Division - looking at use of AI in criminal investigation and evidence construction

I love sharing reports from left-leaning media outlets in my right-wing heavy family WhatsApp groups just to redistribute the pains of cognitive overloading.

Proposed changes to tax laws are simply providing a remote legal backing to an already prevalent police practice - confiscating devices and roving inspection of personal chats

This week Inquest covered false promises: that the “new” drug war would be less punitive and more focused on public health (it is not), and that big tech policing product ShotSpotter makes communities safer (it does not). Read the full recap: mailchi.mp/inquest.o...

It’s all in the ground truth (or the lack thereof)

S.J.💙🩵💙🦋🦓@glimmers2.bsky.social · last yr.

The MTA is working with AI companies to deploy tech that would analyze security footage as it's being filmed. They want to use a technology notoriously unreliable and biased to monitor subways and send in police in real time #hightechracialprofiling

Defence AI is built by, and for, war capitalists.

U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home. theintercept.com/2025/04/30/i...

U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home.

After deploying AI tools in Israel and on the U.S. border, American tech companies are now powering domestic repression.

theintercept.com

Authoritarian regimes have not just Co-opted “decolonisation” and “sovereignty”, but also “privacy” and “data protection”. State is claiming privacy against its own citizens.

Delhi Police arresting people based on facial recognition match score of 32%! At this point, such machine-driven ‘intelligence’ is simply a legitimation/rationalisation exercise.

Thinking of Karen Barad’s relational ontology. ‘Identification’ here is no longer a search for pre-existing reality but a discursive tool to actively shape and produce reality. The reality here being “criminality”.

An important thread on the new Sentencing Council guidelines on pre-sentencing reports

Cassia Rowland@cassiarowland.bsky.social · last yr.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently on the new Sentencing Council guidelines – specifically about the proposal on ethnic and religious minorities. But what’s actually being proposed, is it sensible, and who are the Sentencing Council anyway? 🧵

Facial recognition is not about identification, it’s about labelling. The state doesn’t want to ‘see’ you, it already sees you and wants to ‘unsee you’ by legitimising its ways of (un)seeing as the only appropriate way of seeing.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · last yr.

Hungary bans Pride events and plans to use facial recognition to target attenders

Tenure should empower academics to pursue radical research, to speak truth to power and to fight for transformative progress, but my tenured colleagues seem to just chase the money, obediently follow power and fight only for the progress of their CVs

Columbia is as example of why protestors/encampments were demanding review/divestment of funding sources. Universities have failed this litmus test, rather, shown their true colours. But guess what, so called tenured “critical scholars” will continue to benefit from this.