Symbolic interactionism is a sociological theory that develops from practical considerations and alludes to humans' particular use of shared language to create common symbols and meanings, for use in both intra- and interpersonal communication. According to Macionis, symbolic interactionism is "a framework for building theory that sees society as the product of everyday interactions of individuals". In other words, it is a frame of reference to better understand how individuals interact with one another to create symbolic worlds, and in return, how these worlds shape individual behaviors. It is a framework that helps understand how society is preserved and created through repeated interactions between individuals. The interpretation process that occurs between interactions helps create and recreate meaning. It is the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that affect the interaction between individuals. Individuals act on the premise of a shared understanding of meaning within their social context. Thus, interaction and behavior is framed through the shared meaning that objects and concepts have attached to them. From this view, people live in both natural and symbolic environments.
Michael D. Maltz is an American electrical engineer, criminologist and Emeritus Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago in criminal justice, and adjunct professor and researcher at Ohio State University.
Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969) was an Austrian-American historian, sociologist and criminologist, who made significant contributions to modern Mexican history during his career at Columbia University.
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is an American sociologist and urban ethnographer. He is William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology & African-American Studies at Columbia University, a position he has held since 1999. In his work, Venkatesh has studied gangs and underground economies, public housing, advertising and technology. As of 2018, he is the Director of Signal: The Tech & Society Lab at Columbia University.
Jock Young was a British sociologist and an influential criminologist.
Lawrence W. Sherman is an American experimental criminologist and police educator who is the founder of evidence-based policing.
David Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and professor of sociology at New York University, and an honorary professor in Criminology at Edinburgh Law School. He is well known for his historical and sociological studies of penal institutions, for his work on the welfare state, and for his contributions to criminology, social theory, and the study of social control.
Lonnie Athens teaches in the criminology department at Seton Hall University and was senior research criminologist at Georgetown University Law Center.
Vincenzo Ruggiero was an Italian-born sociologist who was Professor of Sociology at Middlesex University, London. He was also director of the Centre for Social and Criminological Research at Middlesex University. He died in London on 3 February 2024, at the age of 73. He is survived by his partner of 33 years, Cynthia, and daughter, Lucia.
The Stockholm Prize in Criminology is an international prize in the field of criminology, established under the aegis of the Swedish Ministry of Justice. It has a permanent endowment in the trust of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology Foundation. The Stockholm Prize in Criminology is a distinguished part of the Stockholm Criminology Symposium, an annual event taking place during three days in June.
Criminology is the interdisciplinary study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field in both the behavioural and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, political scientists, economists, legal sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social workers, biologists, social anthropologists, scholars of law and jurisprudence, as well as the processes that define administration of justice and the criminal justice system.
David L. Weisburd, is an Israeli/American criminologist who is well known for his research on crime and place, policing and white collar crime. Weisburd was the 2010 recipient of the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology, and was awarded the Israel Prize in Social Work and Criminological Research in 2015, considered the state's highest honor. Weisburd is Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. and Walter E. Meyer Professor Emeritus of Law and Criminal Justice in the Institute of Criminology of the Hebrew University Faculty of Law. At George Mason University, Weisburd was founder of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy and is now its Executive Director. Weisburd also serves as Chief Science Advisor at the National Policing Institute in Washington, D.C. Weisburd was the founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology, and is editor of the Cambridge Elements in Criminology Series.
Martin Guevara Urbina (1972) is a Mexican-born American author, writer, researcher, professor, and speaker who, as a sociologist and criminologist, works on Latina and Latino issues in the United States.
Walter Reckless was an American criminologist known for his containment theory.
Jeffrey Ian Ross is a scholar, professor, and criminologist specializing in the fields of policing, corrections, political crime, violence, street culture, graffiti and street art, and crime and justice in American Indian communities. Since 1998 Ross has been a professor at the University of Baltimore. He is a former co-chair and chair of the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology. Ross is an author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of numerous books.
Valerie Jenness is an author, researcher, public policy advisor, and professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Jenness is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and prior to that, was a senior visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. Jenness served as dean of the School of Social Ecology from 2009 to 2015 and chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society from 2001-2006. Jenness is credited with conducting the first systemic study of transgender women in men's prisons.
Per-Olof Helge Wikstrӧm is Professor of Ecological and Developmental Criminology at the University of Cambridge, Professorial Fellow of Girton College and Principal Investigator of the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+), a major ESRC funded longitudinal study of young people in the UK which aims to advance knowledge about crime causation and prevention. His main research interests are developing a unified theory of the causes of crime, testing it empirically and applying it to devising knowledge-based prevention policies. His work is internationally acknowledged, as demonstrated by his election as a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology in 2010 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011.
Norman Kent Denzin was an American professor of sociology. He was an emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was research professor of communications, College of Communications scholar, professor of sociology, professor of cinema studies, professor in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Denzin's academic interests included interpretive theory, performance studies, qualitative research methodology, and the study of media, culture and society.
Matthew Windust Hughey is an American sociologist known for his work on race and racism. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where he is also an adjunct faculty member in the Africana Studies Institute; American Studies Program; Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, & Policy; Sustainable Global Cities Initiative, and; graduate certificate program in Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, & Politics. His work has included studying whiteness, race and media, race and politics, racism and racial assumptions within genetic and genomic science, and racism and racial identity in white and black American fraternities and sororities.
Kathleen Marian Charmaz was the developer of constructivist grounded theory, a major research method in qualitative research internationally and across many disciplines and professions. She was professor emerita of sociology at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California, and former director of its Faculty Writing Program. Charmaz’s background was in occupational therapy and sociology. Charmaz’s areas of expertise included grounded theory, symbolic interactionism, chronicity, death and dying, qualitative health research, scholarly writing, sociological theory, social psychology, research methods, health and medicine, aging, sociology of emotions, and the body.
