The riots of summer 2011: Seminar organised by the Campaign for Social Science

An audience of policy makers, think tanks and academics enjoyed a wide spectrum of views and insights into the events of summer 2011 in English towns and cities, as they gathered at Gresham College, London on 13th October 2011.

A podcast of the event will be available here shortly. Links to slide presentations (where used) are included next to the speakers’ names below.

The riots of August 2011 took the nation by surprise. Much was said at the time by journalists, politicians and pundits who tried to explain why the riots happened. This event, organised by the Campaign for Social Science, brought together leading experts from a wide spectrum of social science disciplines to offer their perspectives on the riots and offer possible ways forward.

The day focused on three themes (read the separate posts by clicking on the links below):

• How did we come to this ?
• Is Britain “broken”?
• Were the rioters “just criminals”?

The conference was generously sponsored by the social science publishers Routledge and SAGE, with their social science blogging platform, socialsciencespace.com , and by the Institute of Community Cohesion.

Some Further Reading

• Contemporary Social Science: the journal of the Academy of Social Sciences – Special Issue on ‘Crowds’ forthcoming November 2011. website
• Jon Silverman, Crime, Policy and the Media (Routledge, October 2011)
• Steve Reicher AcSS, Mad Mobs and Englishmen ( imminent publication as ebook here )
• Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies almost always do Better. (2009).
• Mike Hough and JV Felitzer, ‘Measuring public attitudes to criminal justice’ in Sage Handbook of Criminological Research Methods (2012)
• Joseph Rowntree Foundation report: the lessons to be learned from the Riots (pdf)