CHED Public Seminar: "Dangerous Minds: Contested Narratives of Criminal Profiling"
Event Details
- Date:
- Thursday, 02 April 2015
- Time:
- 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
- Room:
- CCCS Seminar Room, Level 4
- Location:
- Forgan Smith Tower
- UQ Location:
- Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://www.ched.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=219611&pid=170139
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Ms Narelle Jones
- Phone:
- 69492
- Email:
- narelle.jones@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- History of European Discourses
Event Description
- Full Description:
- Criminal profiling, the practice of ascertaining behavioural and demographic information about an unknown offender from a crime scene, which might help identify him or her, has its roots in the psychological profiles of leading National Socialists and war criminals during the 1940s as well as the efforts to identify New York’s Mad Bomber in the mid-1950s. Developed further during the 1970s by FBI agents, who categorized serial criminals as either “organized” or “disorganized” on the basis of their interviews with thirty-six convicted murderers, criminal profiling has since become a staple of popular fiction (The Silence of the Lambs) and television (Cracker, Profiler, Criminal Minds). More recently, British psychologists have developed both geographic profiling and investigative psychology, which are based more firmly in clinical experience, statistical analysis and psychological research than their predecessors, with the aim of providing more effective analytical tools to investigators.
While the history of ‘criminal profiling’ is relatively short, several pervasive, but competing narratives have built up around it. The first portrays profiling as an art or a form of magic in which the profiler develops their insights by putting themselves in the offender’s shoes. While this narrative is perhaps most prominent in fictional accounts of profiling, its source has been profilers themselves, who historically have struggled to describe the scientific process or mechanism by which they come to their conclusions. The second narrative that has developed around criminal profiling portrays it as a systematic science based firmly in psychological research and statistics, while the third argues that it is mere sleight of hand or a dangerous form of charlatanry. In this paper, I will use a public debate over the legitimacy of criminal profiling that occurred in 2010 in order to explore these competing narratives and the boundary work that has accompanied them.
Heather Wolffram completed her PhD in History at the University of Queensland in 2005 before postdoctoral fellowships at the National University of Singapore and the Centre for the History of European Discourses (UQ). She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She is the author of The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research and Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870-1939 (2009) as well as several articles on the history of psychical research and parapsychology. Her current research project is a history of forensic psychology, which is funded by a three-year Marsden Grant, and she is also conducting research on the history of forensic medicine in colonial contexts.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
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- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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