“Delicate Infractions”: Innovations, Expansions, and Revolutions
in the Crime Genre / Friday 14 – Saturday 15 June, 2019
Maynooth University, Ireland 
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges famously remarked that the detective genre “thrives on the continual and delicate infraction of its rules”. Taking this as a point of departure, the 8th Biennial conference of the International Crime Fiction Research Group will aim to bring together researchers with a shared interest in exploring how the genre has changed and continues to change by way of such delicate infractions, but also occasionally by way of full-blown transgression and definitive ruptures.
Under the broad title of “Delicate Infractions”, we invite proposals related to the following areas:
Systemic troubles reflected in the crime genre
- The crime genre in the age of Black Lives Matter, Trump and resurgent far-right ideology.
- The representation and promotion of radical politics in crime narrative.
- Genre responses to the refugee crisis in Europe and beyond.
- How can or should the genre reckon with the ‘slow violence’ of pollution, climate change, ocean acidification, and ecocide?
Formal re-configurations of the crime genre:
- Re-imaginings and re-workings of the tropes of crime.
- Re-configurations of the archetypal detective/criminal/victim triad.
- Challenges to the gendered and racialized assumptions of conventional crime narratives.
- Crime, Modernism, and/or Postmodernism (and beyond).
- Crime, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde.
- Hybrids and intersections with other genres.
Changing technologies and how they influence crime, crime detection, and crime writing
- The technological pre-conditions for the emergence of the genre.
- Historic changes or ruptures wrought on the genre since its inception by technological innovations in transport, communications, and weaponry.
- Cyberspace, Artificial Intelligence, and the elaboration of new kinds of crime and new modes of investigation.
- Digital Humanities, Big Data, Digital Gazetteers, Crowd Sourcing; New technologies for Crime Fiction Studies.
- Apps, Immersive Narratives and technology-supported Crime Fiction Tourism.
- The place of YouTube, Social Media, podcasting, and other online platforms in the publication of crime narrative.
- New technologies and new experiences of reading Crime Fiction.
As in previous years, we also welcome submissions that do not fall neatly within the above categories (or that expand them), and we are open to research questions that are themselves ‘infractional’ in respect of the critical paradigms that have grown around crime genre scholarship.
Submissions can be centred on crime fiction and/or film, but we also welcome submissions relating to true crime and that analyse other forms of media, as well as examinations of relevant topics within fields such as history, criminology, anthropology etc. Our guiding objective since our first conference in 2005 is to bring together scholars from a diverse range of areas with a view to highlighting and exploring the points of convergence (and divergence) that emerge.
Organising Committee Chair Dr David Conlon (MU). Committee members Dr Dominique Jeannerod (QUB); Dr Kate Quinn (NUIG); Dr Marieke Krajenbrink (UL).
Please send your abstracts to one of the following by November 29th 2018: