New Member Feature: Amelia Curran

Dr. Amelia Curran is an Instructor in the Criminal Justice Department. Her work studies geographies of crime and criminal justice, currently with an interest in the intersection between housing and criminal justice. Her most recent project studied gang territories as urban spaces made and maintained through embodied and other material practices. Her book, The Assembled Geographies of Gang Territories: Slipping the Line (Palgrave McMillan) was released in 2023.

Learn more about Amelia in the short interview below:

CRiCS: What are your areas of research interest? 

AC: I am interested in geographies of crime and influenced by material approaches that focus less on what is happening and more on how. My previous research studied gang territories and I am presently studying bail conditions of release. I am interested, for instance, in the ways a home is made into a carceral space while out on bail or how mobilities change to abide by the imposed conditions.

CRiCS: Are there areas you would like to study or considered working on in the past, but probably won’t get to?

AC: I have in the past been interested in medical sociology and anthropology. I wrote a paper on prostate cancer temporality that I never published and was interested in the classification systems of the DSM-5 for my PhD for a while (I really loved the 2000 book Sorting Things Out by Bowker & Star at the time), but I was dissuaded from that because of the difficulty in accessing funding for theoretical social scientific medical research.

CRiCS: What research projects are you currently working on or plan to work on in the future?

AC: The plan for my future work is to continue looking at the connections between housing and criminality.

CRiCS: What do you do in your free time (if you have any!)? Do you have any hobbies or pets?

AC: My free time is still pretty busy with my kids who are 6 & 9, but I do love auctions when I can get to them!