Professor Alison Young

• Head of Discipline

Academic on Sabbatical in Semester 1, 2008

LL.B.(Hons)(Edin), M.Phil, Ph.D. (Cantab)
Phone: +61 3 8344 6569
Email: ayoung@ unimelb.edu.au
Location: Room 517, John Medley Building, Parkville Campus

Please click her to download a Curriculum Vitae

Background

Alison Young joined the Department in 1995. She has an LL.B (Hons) from Edinburgh University and a Masters and PhD in Criminology from Cambridge University. She is the author of Judging the Image (2005), Imagining Crime (1996) and Femininity in Dissent (1990), as well as numerous articles on the intersections of law, crime and culture. She previously taught in criminology, law and women's studies at the Universities of Manchester, Lancaster and Cambridge. Professor Young is an Associate Editor of journals including Feminist Theory, the Griffith Law Review, and Law and Critique. She has been a Visiting Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and at Amherst College, and a Visiting Research Fellow at McGill University, London University, New York University and Hong Kong University. In 1998 and 2000, she was the Karl Loewenstein Fellow in Political Science and Jurisprudence at Amherst College, Massachusetts. Professor Young has been an invited plenary speaker at numerous international conferences, including the US Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, the British Criminological Conference, the Canadian Law and Society Association, the Law and Society Association of the United States, the British Critical Legal Conference, and the International Association of Law and Literature.

Research

Her research interests lie primarily within the areas of cultural criminology, criminal law, sexual violence, law and aesthetics, and feminist theory. Recent research falls into three distinct areas:

• The production and regulation of images in public space. From 2001-4 she carried out ARC-funded research on graffiti; and from 2008-2010 she will be conducting a study of street art in Melbourne and a range of international centres including New York, London and Amsterdam. The study aims to consider issues such as artists’ motivations; socio-legal responses; and the affective nature of the encounter with street art. She has also contributed to consultancy projects on graffiti, notably the Graffiti Culture Research Project (with Mark Halsey) in 2002, and the writing of a Draft Graffiti Strategy for the City of Melbourne in 2004.
• Criminal justice responses to victims of sexual assault, centring on an ARC-funded Linkage project (together with co-investigators in the Melbourne Law School, Ballart University and Victoria Police).
• Cultural representations of law, justice and violence. She is engaged in writing a book, provisionally entitled Visions of Violence, on cinematic representations of violence and their implications for our understandings of justice (examining case studies such as rape and revenge, homicide, and the 9/11 attacks).

Subjects Taught

• 191-221 Critical Criminal Law
• 191-315 Crime and Culture
• 191-438 Texts and Violence

For 191221 and 191315, please select the 'criminology' discipline in the handbook and follow the links to the subject details

Supervision

Professor Young supervises Honours and postgraduate research projects in the areas of: poststructuralist theory, crime and justice; sexual assault, law and criminal justice; cultural representations of crime, law and justice; graffiti and street art; sexual politics and sexual difference; socio-legal responses to violence.

Recent Publications and Papers

Books

Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law (2005), London & New York: Routledge.

Journal Articles

‘YOUNG, A. – ‘Images in the Aftermath of Trauma: Responding to September 11’. Crime, Media, Culture 3(1) ; 30-48 (2007).

HALSEY, M. & YOUNG, A. (2006) – ‘Our Desires are Ungovernable’: Writing Graffiti in Urban Space. Theoretical. Criminology 10(3): 275-306.

Book Chapters

YOUNG, A. (2008) ‘Culture, Cultural Criminology and the Imagination of Crime’ in The Australasian Critical Criminology Reader, ed. T. Anthony and C. Cunneen, Sydney: Federation Press.

YOUNG, A. (2008, forthcoming) ‘Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibility of Sincerity’, in The Rhetoric of Sincerity, ed. M. Bal, C. Smith and E. Van Alphen, Palo Alta: Stanford University Press.

YOUNG, A. (2007) ‘Piss Christ on Trial: Disgust, Obscenity and Transgression’ in The Trials of Art, ed. D. Mclean, London: Ridinghouse Press.

Conference Papers

YOUNG, A. – Narrating 9/11: Justice and Visual Ethics in the Aftermath of Disaster. Keynote lecture delivered by invitation at a symposium entitled ‘Seeing Justice Done: Interrogating Law at the Margins’, Haverford College, Pennsylvania. 30-31 March 2007.

YOUNG, A. – Witnessing and Trauma: Judgment and Legal Ethics after 9/11. Paper presented at the International Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, Georgetown Law School, Washington D.C., 23-24 March 2007.

YOUNG, A. - September 11th and the Documentation of Trauma: Authority, Sincerity and Ethics. Plenary lecture presented by invitation, at the National Postgraduate Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney, November 2006.

YOUNG, A. - Narrating September 11th: Documentation, Trauma and Ethics. Paper presented at the International Conference of the Australian Law and Literature Association, Melbourne, July 2006.

YOUNG, A. – September 11th and the Documentation of Trauma: Authority, Sincerity and Ethics. Invited plenary lecture given at a conference entitled The Rhetoric of Sinceity, University of Leiden, June 2006.

YOUNG, A. - Callings. Plenary address presented by invitation at the Annual Meeting of the United States Law and Society Association, Las Vegas, 2-5 June 2005.

YOUNG, A. - Reading Law in the Image. Paper presented by invitation at the Annual Meeting of the Law, Culture and the Humanities Association, Austin, TX, 11-13 March 2005.

YOUNG, A. – Judging the Image. Paper given as part of an author-meets-readers session relating to her book Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law (Routledge 2005), at the Annual Meeting of the Law, Culture and the Humanities Association, Austin, TX, 11-13 March 2005.