“A sustainable future for plastics is within our grasp. But it will require chemical scientists, policy makers, those in industry, and those from a range of disciplines to work together.“

In collaboration with The Royal Society of Chemistry, Professor Claire Gwinnett joins other experts on microplastics to explore the important issues and difficult questions about microplastics. Find out more here.

A new book, which tells the stories of thousands of labourers caught up in the Nazi occupation of Alderney in World War 2, has been published.

‘The book [‘Adolf Isand’: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney] is the culmination of ten years’ research carried out by Staffordshire University forensic archaeologists Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls and Associate Professor Kevin Colls. Their investigations on the island have also been the subject of a TV documentary which was screened on the Smithsonian Channel in 2019. Find out more here.

Professor Caroline Sturdy-Colls, Associate Professor Jo Turner, Associate Professor Rachel Bolton-King, Dr Sam Spence and Emma Tilley have co-authored an article with Karsten Bettels (Police Academy Lower Saxony), Dave Grimstead (Locate International), Cheryl Allsop (University of South Wales), Anna Chaussée (University of Winchester), Brendan Chapman (Murdoch University), David Keatley (Murdoch University) and Annette Marquardt (State Attorney Department Verden) on cold cases.

“In recent years, students in police academies and higher education institutions around the world have worked together to analyse cold cases including long-term missing persons cases in collaboration with investigators and prosecutors. In 2020, three European organisations, the Police Expert Network on Missing Persons (PEN-MP), AMBER Alert Europe and Locate International, succeeded in connecting these educational organisations enabling them to work collectively on cases and conduct cold case analyses (CCA) across international borders.”

You can read the article, ‘Finding the missing and unknown: Novel educational approaches to warming up cold cases’ on Science Direct here.

In this co-authored report, Dr Luke Telford, Professor David Etherington, Vice Chancellor & Chief Executive, Professor Martin Jones and Citizens Advice Stoke-on-Trent, address the ‘pending poverty catastrophe in Stoke-on-Trent and how benefit cuts and the cost-of-living crisis impact upon the area, particularly the poor’.

Read the full report here.

Dr Helen Poole, Executive Dean of the School of Justice, Security and Sustainability, has co-edited Firearms: Global Perspectives on Consequences, Crime and Control with Dr Simon Sneddon (University of Northampton). The book explores the illicit use of firearms across the globe, including legal, social science, technical and research perspectives on the issue.

Read more here.

Dr Luke Telford has co-writen a journal article called “Closing the door on protection? Exploring the impact of lockdown upon children and young people’s services in the UK”, with D. Briggs, A. Ellis, A. Lloyd, and J. Kotzé. The article was published in the YVJ special issue, Critical youth voices on the Covid 19 pandemic: International perspectives and can be found here. 

The Centre for Crime, Justice and Security carried out work for the Home Office on the effectiveness of digital forensics in child sexual exploitation.

‘An observational study using the Impact Point approach to measure the utility of digital forensic science in online child sexual exploitation cases’ can be accessed here. 

You can now read Dr Jon Davies’ work, ‘Labour exploitation and posted workers in the European construction industry’, in European White-Collar Crime: Exploring the Nature of European Realities.

Find out more about the book, which is edited by Nicholas Lord, Éva Inzelt, Wim Huisman and Rita Faria, here. 

Dr Jon Davies’ paper in the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime “contributes to the state-corporate crime agenda by demonstrating how discussions on criminogenic industry structures provide critical links between organizational processes and broader political-economic dynamics, which is crucial for developing a criminological discourse.”

Read ‘Criminogenic Dynamics of the Construction Industry: A State-Corporate Crime Perspective’ here. 

Jon Davies’ – Criminology and Sociology Lectuer – co-authored article with Nicholas Lord, Cecilia Flores Elizondo and Jon Spencer is now available. 

“This article analyses three key areas in the literature on food fraud where we see fault lines emerging: 1. food fraud research orientations; 2. food fraud detection and prevention (and the dehumanisation and decontextualisation associated with analytical testing); and, 3. food fraud regulation and criminalisation. We argue that these fault lines raise questions over the plausibility of knowledge on food frauds and in some cases produce specious arguments.”

Read ‘Fault lines of food fraud: key issues in research policy‘ here.