In this week’s faculty seminar, NLSIU is hosting Ian Loader, Professor of Criminology and Professorial Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, on campus on January 14, 2026. He will deliver a lecture on the topic ‘Beyond motonormative punishment: On road safety as environmental regulation.’

Abstract

Criminology has long had a blind-spot concerning road safety. The field tends to accept that the problem is best left to technical specialists; treats road safety as somehow separate from its focal concerns with public safety; and reproduces an ideology of streets as distinct socio-juridical spaces. In so doing, criminology leaves unaddressed a significant dimension of one its core issues: how to create safe and liveable urban environments. In this paper, I set out one path via which to unsettle these distinctions. I begin with a brief historical and geographic sketch of the forms of harm and violence associated with car-dominant mobility systems. I then offer a critique of what I term motonormative punishment – a regime of legal sanctions and culture of blame that focuses on the individualised responsibility of a minority of ‘careless’ or ‘dangerous’ drivers while accommodating the structural violence generated by systems of automobility. I argue, instead, for theorizing road safety in terms of diffused responsibility between actors and hybrid actants in a system. It follows, I conclude, that we should radically decentre criminal punishment as a response to road violence in favour of forms of environmental regulation organised around five harm reduction principles: diversion, design, distributed agency, deliberative learning, and the disassembly of dangerous actants.

About the Speaker

Besides being faculty at the Oxford University, Prof. Ian Loader is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society for the Arts.

He is the author of numerous books, edited collections, theoretical and empirical papers, and works of civic engagement on security, public and private policing; sensibilities towards dis/order and justice; penal policy and culture; crime control and political ideologies, and the democratic purposes of criminology. His current work coalesces around aspects of environmental harm.

Prof. Ian is presently in receipt of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2025-2028) for a project entitled ‘Car harms: Automobility and the objects of criminology’. The project seeks to use the car, and systems of automobility, as a vehicle through which to explore what it means practice criminology in the midst of a climate breakdown. Ian is also teaching a graduate seminar on ‘Criminology and the car’.