Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology

This handbook explores the concept of 'harm' in criminological scholarship and lays the foundation for a future zemiological agenda. 'Social harm' as a theoretical construct has become established as an alternative, broader lens through which to understand the causation and alleviation of widespread harm in society, thus moving beyond criminology and state definitions of crime and extending the range of criminological research. Applying zemiological concepts, this book comprehensively explores topics including violence, moral indifference, workplace injury, corporate and state harms, animal rights, migration, gender, poverty, security and victimisation. This definitive work covers theory, research, scholarship and future visions across four sections, and includes contributions from areas such as criminology, sociology, socio-legal and cultural studies, social policy and international relations. It offers readers up-to-date, original theoretical perspectives and an analysis of a broad range of issues from a 'social harm' perspective.  

This book explores how neoliberal consumer capitalist ideals of meritocracy, competitive individualism, and responsibilisation have shaped trans people’s subjectivity and lived experiences of harm. The book critiques the adequacy of legal constructs of hate crime to acknowledge the social harms experienced. The deep ethnographic data illuminates a variety of social harms that result from the failure of social structures and systems to acknowledge gender identities beyond the binary. The book offers a historically grounded theorisation of anti-trans sentiment to produce a persuasive argument for understanding the harms of hate as recognitive harms. In this sense, the book opens up a path to theorizing the empirically documented emotional and psychological harms of both transphobia and transnormative ideals, as rooted in a binary gender order that has been invigorated by the hyper individualism and competitiveness of capitalist neoliberalism.