Professor Katja Franko from the University of Oslo will deliver the 2024 ICCJ Annual Lecture, titled “Hierarchies of Citizenship: Criminology, Global Inequality, and the Injustice of Membership” on Thursday, April 18, 2024, at 1:00 pm in the Great Hall at Queen’s University Belfast.

How well equipped are we to understand social justice inequalities on a global scale? How should these inequalities shape our theoretical and methodological perspectives? While criminological scholarship has a long tradition for addressing inequalities pertaining to class, gender and race, these perspectives are far less developed within a global framework. The lecture discusses the concept of hierarchies of citizenship for the purpose of conceptualizing socio-legal inequality in a global perspective and examines its usefulness in an empirical project.

Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo (Norway). Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, she studied law at the University of Ljubljana and obtained her PhD degree in 2003 from the University of Oslo, where she was then appointed as professor in 2009. Her primary research interests focus on globalization, migration and border control, international police co-operation, sociology of knowledge and the uses of advanced information and communication technologies in contemporary criminal justice. She is the recipient of the 2023 Thorsten Sellin & Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck Award from the American Society of Criminology. She also has received, together with Professor Helene Gundhus, the 2015 British Journal of Criminology Radzinowicz Prize for the article “Policing Humanitarian Borderlands: Frontex, Human Rights and the Precariousness of Life”.

The ICCJ Annual Lecture is organized on a yearly basis by the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, a hub that brings together scholars from the School of Law and the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work.