We are happy to welcome Professor Ian Loader (Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford) for a seminar on 12 November. He’ll discuss his new book 'Ecologies of Security' (Bristol University Press, 2026, with his longstanding collaborators Evi Girling, Richard Sparks, and Ben Bradford), an extensive essay on how we should think about everyday security amid intensifying awareness of environmental risks and climate disruption.
Practical information
Chairs: Lucas Melgaço and Mattias De Backer
Discussant: Floris Liekens
📆 14h-16h, 12 November 2026
📍Room I2.02, Etterbeek campus
It’s a free, public event, but places are limited. So please register here.
Biography
Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology and Professorial Fellow of All Souls College. He is also an Honorary Professor Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Ian is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society for the Arts. Ian is the author of numerous books, edited collections, theoretical and empirical papers, and works of civic engagement on security, public and private policing; sensibilities towards dis/order and justice; and the democratic purposes of criminology. His current work coalesces around aspects of environmental harm.
Abstract
In this seminar I’ll present the key arguments from our recently published book, Ecologies of Security. The book draws on nearly four years of research in the town of Macclesfield in northern England and shows how experiences of local disorder have been - and we argue, need to be - re-framed under conditions of durable austerity and climate breakdown. Today, worries about disorder focus on criminal and non-criminal harms to local and wider environments coupled with anxiety that the basic tasks of urban governance - of creating safe dwelling places - are being neglected. By bringing environmental and green criminology into conversation, we show how communities’ hopes for habitable futures demand new ways of understanding—and acting upon—everyday disorder. We need to think ecologically about public safety.