[Air-L] AOIR 2026 Panel Proposal on Digital Criminology - Call for Extended Abstracts

[Piotr Siuda]

Dear AoIR community,
I would like to invite expressions of interest and extended abstracts for a
proposed panel on Digital Criminology for the upcoming AoIR conference.

Digital criminology has emerged as a productive interdisciplinary framework
for examining how digital infrastructures, platforms, data practices, and
algorithmic systems reshape crime, harm, justice, and regimes of control.
Importantly, this field moves beyond narrow understandings of "cybercrime"
as purely online offending, instead conceptualizing criminalization,
victimization, governance, and illicit economies as deeply hybrid
socio-technical processes, entangled across online/offline environments.

In the context of internet research, digital criminology offers a
particularly valuable lens for addressing core AoIR concerns: platform
power, visibility and surveillance, mediated governance, digital cultures
of harm, and the methodological challenges of studying sensitive or
encrypted online spaces.

This panel aims to bring together scholars working at the intersection of
internet studies, criminology, media and communication research, digital
sociology, and related fields to explore how digitalization reconfigures
criminological phenomena and how internet researchers can contribute to
these debates.

Possible themes include (but are not limited to):

Platform-mediated illicit economies (e.g., darknet markets, encrypted
channels, social media drug trade)
Digital harms, harassment, extremist networks, and online victimization
Datafication, surveillance, and algorithmic governance in policing and
justice
Visibility regimes, infrastructures of control, and platform moderation
practices
AI, automation, and bias in criminological decision-making systems
Methodological reflections: digital ethnography, computational approaches,
research ethics in high-risk online fields
Cultural meanings of crime and harm in online communities and digital
publics

Submission process & timeline

To assemble the panel proposal, I kindly invite colleagues to submit an
extended abstract (1000–1200 words), prepared in accordance with AoIR
guidelines.

Deadline for extended abstracts: 24 February 2026
Notification of acceptance for the panel: 26 February 2026
Final panel submission to AoIR (by organizer): 1 March 2026

Please send your extended abstract or expression of interest to:
piotr.siuda at gmail.com

--

*Piotr Siuda* (PhD, Professor of Media Studies)

piotrsiuda.com

Faculty of Cultural Studies

Department of Game Studies and Digital Culture

Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland


Associate Editor, *Journal of Creative Communication *(SAGE Journals)


*Recent papers:*

*-- **Ghosted by the drug trade: A digital ethnography of absence, ethics,
and epistemic friction on Tinder**, Crime, Media, Culture**.*

*-- **Digital drug trading ecologies in context: Technological, geographic,
and linguistic variation across darknet platforms*, *International Journal
of Drug Policy.*

-- *Navigating community-transaction and egalitarian-hierarchy divides:
redefining virtual communities in the darknet drug trade and beyond*,
*Information,
Communication & Society.*