Curriculum Information

This module introduces students to two important contemporary areas of criminology – Green Criminology and Critical Animal Studies, which includes environmental crimes and harms and animal abuse. A growing understanding of the widespread and often irreversible negative impacts of these offences have forced these issues onto the global political agenda. The illegal wildlife trade, for example, is one of the fastest growing black markets worldwide and is often positioned alongside illegal drugs, arms and human trafficking in terms of financial reward and impact. Growing evidence suggests the illegal wildlife trade erodes state authority, fuels civil conflict, threatens national stability and international security, and provokes substantial economic losses internationally. It also increases poverty and negatively impacts food security, public health (e.g. emergence of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19), climate change and biodiversity. Growing concern over climate change, biodiversity loss (in particular, the iconic species), pollution and deforestation has generated significant international political interest and responses from the key agencies such as the UN, INTERPOL, EU, leading to calls for transformative changes to restore and protect nature (e.g. UN Sustainable Development Goals 2021). The module also explores the paradoxical relationship between human and non-human animals and contemporary developments in animal protection and rights. Why, for example, is it legal to kill, sexually exploit and harm animals in the context of food production but illegal to do so at home. Why is a rabbit in a field conferred different protections than those in a garden, home, lab or farm? How is animal abuse linked to interpersonal violence and why is this important?

The module introduces students to critical case studies detailing environmental disasters - such as the BP Oil disaster, deforestation of the Brazilian Rainforest and the illegal wildlife trade which will be used to discuss the nature and prevalence of green crimes/ harms and evaluate the responses. Students will explore why increasingly such harmful acts are being regulated and criminalised and linked to other serious crimes (such as organised corporate and state crime and human injustice). In considering responses, students will need to consider formal - national and international governmental responses - and informal societal responses, including those by NGOs, and protest and campaign groups.

Students will also be familiarised with new concepts such as eco-justice, species justice, personhood and how these relate to traditional concepts of human rights, speciesism and anthropocentrism. Guest speakers discussing their personal experiences in campaigning, responding and researching these harms will help students link research and theory to practice. While perfecting their group-work, verbal and written skills in debates, podcasts and reports, students will critically reflect on how crime is defined, the study of harms and victimisation, and how other disciplines (e.g. environmental studies, law) approach and respond to environmental crimes/harms and non-human animal abuse.

In summary, this is a challenge-based module which requires students to examine the diverse concepts and definitions of, and explanations for local, national and global environmental challenges, and how these pertain to real-life case studies and responses.