LEXINGTON, Ky. — The University of Kentucky College of Social Work (CoSW) is pleased to announce its inaugural participation at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), taking place in Washington, D.C., Nov. 12-15, 2025. This marks an important milestone as the College broadens its scholarly footprint in criminal justice and criminological research while reaffirming its commitment to advancing justice, equity and social well-being.
The ASC Annual Meeting draws thousands of scholars, researchers and practitioners from around the globe to engage in cutting-edge work on the measurement, etiology, consequences, prevention, control, and treatment of crime and delinquency.
Representing the College are three distinguished faculty members whose research spans digital harm, state-corporate crime, carceral culture, gender-based violence, and youth justice: Dr. Paul Bleakley, Dr. Victoria Collins, and Dr. Nicole McKenna.
Bleakley will chair the annual business meeting of the Division of Historical Criminology and present new empirical work exploring online deviance, cyberstalking, ideological grooming and gendered coercion in digital spaces. In a poster titled “Perspectives on Prison Conditions, Long-Term Sentencing, and Crime Attribution: The Impact of ‘The Visiting Room’”, he examines how media representations shape public understanding of incarceration and long-term sentencing.
Collins, director of the CoSW Criminal Justice program, will participate in a range of scholarly engagements, including paper sessions, author-meets-critic panels and a roundtable on transformative justice praxis. Her presentations link environmental deregulation and techno-utopianism to expansionist narratives and structural harm, and she will serve as featured author of Space Expansionism and Criminology: The Emerging Terrain of Crime, Harm and Violence, a work that prompts criminology to rethink governance, extraction and new frontiers of harm.
McKenna’s program of work addresses carceral culture, gendered systems, pedagogy and trauma-informed practice. Her panel presentations examine how reality-crime television normalizes punishment logics, how girls in detention navigate and resist structural labeling, and how anti-trafficking stakeholders implicitly implement (and sometimes fail to fully embody) trauma-informed principles. She will also take part in roundtables on reentry, youth justice, and the everyday normalization of surveillance and punishment.
“Our faculty’s engagement at ASC 2025 reflects the deeply interdisciplinary nature of our mission,” said Dean Jay Miller. “The College of Social Work is proud to contribute to these national conversations that build knowledge, partnerships and solutions that work toward a more just and compassionate world.”
The debut marks a significant expansion of the College’s scholarly reach, reinforcing its national presence as a leader in criminological research, and interdisciplinary social justice praxis.
