The Division on Queer Criminology is an official division of the American Society of Criminology.

The goals of the Division are:

  1. To encourage study in and the development of Queer Criminology,
  2. To connect faculty and student researchers studying Queer Criminology to enhance and improve research,
  3. To connect researchers with policymakers in order to make meaningful change for LGBTQIA communities,
  4. To share promising teaching strategies to better inform students on issues relevant to LGBTQIA populations

History

Formal planning to establish our Division began at the American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting in November 2019 in San Francisco via a meeting of a core group of scholars doing queer criminological research and teaching. Christina DeJong was instrumental in organizing this meeting and consulted with these scholars to do this via the queerccj listserv that Christine Galvin-White established in 2012 and is now managed by Vanessa Panfil. Prior to the meeting, Christina organized a short survey asking members on the queerccj listserv to answer key questions about their thoughts so we could focus the discussion at the meeting. The meeting was a great success with about 35 people attending. After the meeting, we crafted a survey that was sent out to the queerccj listserv to assess interest in moving forward with a Division and the survey noted an overwhelming yes from members on the listserv – they wanted to establish a Division of Queer Criminology. We then created a Petition Committee that developed and circulated a petition to be signed and submitted to the ASC Executive Board. In total, we received written support from 211 unique individuals. We obtained the required number of signatures in August 2020 and forwarded those to the ASC Executive Board. We were officially approved as a Division at the Annual Board Meeting on November 17, 2020. We also created a document for mentees and mentors to sign up to so that we could begin the process of mentoring up-and-coming scholars in queer criminology, work that our Mentoring Committee now sustains. In January 2020, we sent out a call to people on the queerccj listserv to volunteer for ad hoc leadership roles for the Division. Before the establishment of the Division of Queer Criminology, these scholars communicated solely through the queerccj listserv, and connected through panels organized at ASC Annual Meetings and social gatherings we organised around the Annual Meetings.