GERN (Groupement Européen de Recherches sur les Normativités) is a large consortium of scientific researchers in the domain of deviance and social control, more precisely studying delinquency, penal institutions, public policies of security and the importance of penal questions in society. Today GERN is a scientific network present in ten European countries and abroad, uniting researchers of different disciplines.
Each year the GERN organizes a doctoral summer school, giving PhD students from the consortium the opportunity to present and discuss their ongoing projects and research results as well as meet young and senior researchers. With the inauguration of this Research Paper Series, GERN intends to monitor and disseminate cutting-edge studies into European security issues, reflecting the result of doctoral research in the framework of the GERN.
The series provides an excellent platform from which to survey key emergent topics in the field. With this series the editors and authors are contributing to a better understanding of contemporary questions, presenting recent research results and scientific reflection, by devising new approaches and by re-evaluating the heritage of social sciences in this domain. It implies a new openness with regard to other disciplines and to the normative questions arising from the constructions of deviance and crime, the commission of criminal acts, its consequences and its development, as well as the application of deviance categories and the social or formal reaction to it by actors in the criminal justice system and beyond.
This is the fifth volume stemming from the annual doctoral conferences organized by the GERN in September 2016 in Dortmund, Germany. The selected theme for this Summer School was "Deviance and Crime - Social Control, Criminal Justice, and Criminology in Europe"; reflecting the variety of theoretical frameworks and methodologies covered by the current PhD theses in the field of criminal justice and deviance as well as fresh and new perspectives on deviant and criminal careers, on the history of restorative justice and on crime as the central theoretical concept in criminology.
