Murder Rates in NZ - a seminar presentation by Tom Brooking and Gabrielle Maxwell

Friday 20 July 2012 12.30pm - 1.30pm
Rutherford House Lecture Theatre Two
All welcome - no RSVP required

In this talk Tom Brooking will bring 40 years of researching and teaching New Zealand history, including the authorship of two general histories, to better understand the relationship between the fluctuating murder rate and other longer term trends in in New Zealand history. In attempting to add a deeper historical understanding to Gabrielle Maxwell's detailed findings he will pay particular attention to economic, demographic, sociological and cultural trends as well as to developments in policing that Dr Maxwell has already begun to delineate.

Dr Tom Brooking teaches in the Department of History and Art History at Otago University. He specialises in New Zealand and comparative rural and environmental history, New Zealand political history and the historical links between New Zealand and Scotland. This research has involved focus on environmental transformation and the role of colonising peoples in that process, farming and its economic, environmental and sociological impacts, the response of Maori as indigenous people to those impacts, and migration and settlement. He has published six sole author books and numerous book chapters, essays and articles. His last major book, with Eric Pawson, was Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand, published by I.B.Tauris (London) in 2010 in their environmental history series based on the Marsden funded project Empires of Grass.

Dr Gabrielle Maxwell is a senior associate of the Institute of Policy Studies and was previously the Director of the Crime and Justice Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research focuses on youth justice, restorative justice, family violence, and criminal justice policy. She has authored, co-authored, or edited several books including Restorative Justice and Practices in New Zealand (2007), Addressing the Causes of Crime: What is the evidence? (2009), The Costs of Crime: Towards Fiscal Responsibility (2011).

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