The Global Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Oliver's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
Teaching
My teaching is closely informed by my research into critical criminology, deviant leisure, consumer culture and social harm. I teach across a range of alternative and critical criminological theories, including zemiology, ultra-realism, cultural criminology, green criminology, sensory criminology and futures criminology. Across my teaching, I encourage students to think beyond conventional legal definitions of crime and to engage with broader questions of harm, power, inequality, violence and justice.
My research on leisure, consumption, environmental harm and emerging digital and algorithmic harms directly shapes the examples, debates and case studies I use in the classroom. I am particularly interested in helping students understand how apparently ordinary or pleasurable aspects of social life — such as tourism, nightlife, gambling, fashion, social media and consumer culture — can be connected to wider structures of exploitation, exclusion and environmental damage. This allows students to see criminology not simply as the study of crime and criminal justice, but as a way of critically examining the organisation of everyday life.
I also have a strong interest in the criminology of the future, including how criminological theory can help us anticipate and understand emerging social, technological and environmental harms. In my teaching, this means asking students to engage with questions about future crime, future harm, climate crisis, digital technologies, artificial intelligence, surveillance, consumer capitalism and changing forms of social control. My aim is to support students in developing a theoretically informed, critical and imaginative criminological perspective that can be applied to both contemporary problems and the uncertain futures they will encounter beyond university.
Contact Oliver
Room 112, 19 Portland Villas, Drake Circus, Plymouth, PL4 8AA
+44 1752 585872
oliver.smith@plymouth.ac.uk