Pioneers in Criminology: Ronnie Lippens

Ronnie Lippens retired from academia in 2019, as Professor of Criminology at Keele University, after a career of 26 years in Belgium and England. His published oeuvre, supervision, and teaching made a signal contribution to the discipline of criminology, most notably in the fields typically referred to as: theoretical criminology, penology, cultural criminology, sensory criminology, visual criminology, and border criminology. Lippens’ innovation in these fields and to the discipline more broadly is his capacity for the effortless synthesis of social science with philosophy and his ability to communicate the complexity of that synthesis – which draws on the paradigms of phenomenology, existentialism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis – to a variety of audiences. This book introduces three decades of Lippens’ research and writing, focusing on six of his key themes, the respective relationships between critical criminological practice and: the human condition, hypermodernity, rhetorical discourse, poststructural theory, Luciferianism, and the ethics of care. The six contributors are all former colleagues of Lippens and respected academics with international reputations of their own, selected from England, Italy, and Brazil across the disciplines of criminology, sociology, philosophy, and legal studies.