Keynote Speaker

Lynne Copson is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology the Open University, UK.  Her principal research interests lie in theories of crime, harm and justice; knowledge production; and utopianism.  She is particularly interested in the relationships between zemiology and criminology as well as the concept of crime and its relationship to harm, as well as in exploring the relationships between utopianism, social research and the production of knowledge.

Lynne’s current research focuses on exploring the contemporary production of knowledge and the impact of this on conceptualisations of harm and justice, and the development of a utopian method as a means for transcending the separation of fact from value in the contemporary production of academic knowledge. 

She has published previously on a variety of topics including the relationship between academic discourse and state power, utopianism and criminology, utopia and social harm, queer utopias, zemiology, penal populism, and the concept of cultural harm.  Her recent publications include the edited collection Crime, Harm and the State (2025) (with Eleni Dimou and Steve Tombs);  ‘Poor policy made durable: when digital transformation meets social harm’ (with Jessamy Perriam), in Digital Welfare: Intersections, implications, interventions (2024); and ‘Finding hope in hopeless times’ in Utopian Thinking in Law, Politics, Architecture and Technology (2022).