The Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC) recognises outstanding contributions to the field biennially through its Christine Alder Award, celebrating an outstanding book which has made a valuable and outstanding contribution to criminology.
At the 2025 ANZSOC Conference, we celebrated the achievements of Professor John Scott and Dr Zoe Staines for the book Island Criminology (Bristol University Press, 2025).
Island Criminology offers a bold and original contribution to the field by placing geography, and specifically “islandness”, at the centre of criminological inquiry. Moving well beyond a narrow focus on islands as isolated or exotic locations, Scott and Staines demonstrate how islands, both literal and socially constructed, have long been mobilised as tools of governance, punishment, and exclusion.
We caught up with Professor Scott to hear what meaning to award means to him.
What does receiving this ANZSOC award mean to you?
I have some colleagues who claim to be anti-awards and any formal recognition of this type. Most of the same people have had pretty elite upbringings (as many academics do), so I can appreciate why these sort of things would not mean much to them. However, it does mean a lot to me and I appreciate the work that ANZSOC puts into maintaining such an award. It is also great that the award is a memorial for one of the pioneers in the field, Christine Alder, and her work.
Could you briefly describe the work or contribution recognised by this award?
The book draws quite a bit on social geography and tries to reconnect it to justice. I say ‘reconnect’ because early criminology started with a strong sense of place and space but became increasingly temporal up until the post-modern and post-structuralist turn in the social sciences during the 1990s. Since then there have been efforts to connect criminology to place, notably ‘rural criminology’, but there are so many places literally left off the map. The other impulse for the book draws on work done variously under the guise of ‘decolonialism’ or ‘southern criminology’, where place and space also feature prominently. We started writing the book at the height of the pandemic, so there was no better time to think of place and space and how it is regulated.
We also wanted to enjoy writing the book and took liberties to draw on as a wide of body of interdisciplinary material as possible, trying to stretch the scope of criminology. So, we jump between history, literary and cultural studies, philosophy and geography, with some empirical social sciences thrown into the mix here and there. It drew on the sort of stuff I would read for both pleasure and work… Hopefully the pleasure in writing the book is translated into the book itself.
What impact do you hope your work will have on communities, policy, or the field?
As we state in the book, islands are often at the periphery of peripheries and have been mostly invisible to criminologists, despite housing ten percent of the world’s population. When islands show up in criminology it is pretty much through a western or northern gaze, with most studies being about tourists and crime and Caribbean, where North Americans take their holidays. So, charting a place for islands in criminology is important, not only because islands are unique environments, but because they connect us to contemporary criminological debates, including those associated with decolonisation and green criminology. There is also a network of island scholars who are highly active in the South Pacific and are producing new ideas and concepts that are fundamental to a global and democratised criminological landscape.
