Professor Ian Loader
Professor of Criminology, Faculty of Law; Fellow of All Souls College
Professor Ian Loader teaches and researches criminology at the University of Oxford. His research and civic engagement over several decades has focused 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.
About
In recent years, Professor Ian Loader has been a member of the Advisory Board for the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales and of the Research Advisory Board of the Canada/Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice from 2016-2025.
Professor Loader 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 to practice criminology in the midst of a climate breakdown. He also teaches a graduate seminar on ‘Criminology and the car’.
He recently completed a three-year study entitled ‘Place, crime and insecurity in everyday life’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The study – conducted with Evi Girling (Oxford), Richard Sparks (Edinburgh) and Ben Bradford (UCL) – investigated how people living in one English town, Macclesfield in Cheshire, talk about and act towards a range of threats that they regard as impinging upon their safety (their personal bodily integrity, their property, their locality, their wider habitat). A book drawing on the research, entitled 'Ecologies of Security: Everyday Disorder in a Climate-Changed World', is due out in 2026.
Image credit: John Cairns
Expertise
- Policing and security
- Everyday in/securities
- The politics of crime and justice
- Environmental harms
- Criminology and urban mobilities
Selected publications
- Ecologies of Security: Everyday Disorder in a Climate-Changed World. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2026 (with E. Girling, R. Sparks and B. Bradford)
- ‘Mobility Freedom: Conceptions of Freedom in Contestations over Urban Transport’, Urban Studies, (2026, in press) (with T. Schwanen and D. Hopkins)
- ‘The Greening of Environmental Criminology: Changing Meanings of Disorder in an English Town’, British Journal of Criminology, (2025) (with with E. Girling, B. Bradford and R. Sparks)
- ‘'Seeing” Disorder in an English Town’, Criminology & Criminal Justice, (2025), (with with B. Bradford, E. Girling, and R. Sparks)
- ‘Inescapable objects? Automobility and everyday disorder in an English town’, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2025, 13 (with B. Bradford, E. Girling, R.Sparks, and S. Bahceci)
- ‘Concerning cars: Automobility and the contours of control, order and harm’, Annual Review of Criminology, 2025, 8:215-237
- ‘Policing and sense of place: “shallow” and “deep” security in an English town’, British Journal of Criminology 2024: 64/4: 791-810; (with B. Bradford, E. Girling and R.Sparks)
- ‘15-Minute Cities and the Denial(s) of Auto-Freedom’, IPPR Progressive Review, 2023, 30/1: 60-64
- 'Security and Everyday Life in Uncertain Times' in A. Liebling S. Maruna L. McAra (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford University Press 2023) (with Richard Sparks, Ben Bradford, Ryan Casey, Evi Girling and Gosia Polanka)
- ‘Reasonable Hopes: Social Theory, Critique and Reconstruction in Contemporary Criminology’, in A. Liebling, J. Shapland, R. Sparks and J. Tankebe (eds.) (2022) Crime, Justice and Social Order: Essays in Honour of A. E. Bottoms. Oxford: Oxford University Press (with Richard Sparks)
Media experience
Professor Loader is experienced in working with the media. He has provided expert comment and op-ed articles for a number of outlets, including The Guardian and spoken on anti-social behaviour and visible policing for BBC Radio 5 Live (December, 2024).