Ian Loader awarded Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to explore the relationship between cars and criminology

Ian Loader, Professor of Criminology, has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust, for a project entitled ‘Car harms: Automobility and the objects of criminology’. The Fellowship will commence on 1 September 2025 and run for three years.

Cars are typically portrayed as objects of freedom, fun, convenience and status. Yet they are also among the most  criminogenic and harmful devices ever invented. This project will use the car to re-appraise criminology’s history, present condition and future prospects, and as an object through which to re-think what it means to practice criminology at a time of climate breakdown.

The car first transformed, and has since structured, the design and ordering of city space, as well as the prospects of urban community. The car has been a target of crime (an object to be damaged or stolen) and the means of criminal activity (the getaway car, the car bomb, the car as weapon). It is a leading actor in cultures and practices of predominantly male transgression – speeding, joyriding, drunk-driving, road-rage, the police chase. It has transformed people’s relation to police authority in particular and state regulation in general: the motor age brought the middle-classes into a new antagonistic relation with policing, while intensifying the social control of minorities. The car is a cause of mass injury and death, yet it has been marketed as a cocoon protecting its occupants from dangerous urban environments. It is also now viewed, and contested, as a significant agent of ecological damage.

The project aims to show how cars, since the early 20th century, have been active in re-ordering social control and governance, urban ecology and infrastructures, and social relations and hierarchies. By looking closely at public conflicts over the ecological harms and regulation of automobility in the Global North and South (using illustrative examples from the UK and India), the study will make a distinctive criminological contribution to debates about the futures of mobility justice and the good city in a climate-changed world.