Karen Laidler

Karen Joe Laidler is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Criminology. Her research focuses on drugs, sex work, youth gangs, and women’s imprisonment. As a native San Franciscan, she has been involved in criminological research since the 1980s, working with non-profit organizations and government agencies in Northern California. She has worked on a variety of primary and policy related research including: evaluation of drug intervention programmes; juvenile court intervention; inmate grievance processes; bail reform; sentencing guidelines; risk assessment for juvenile detention; prison planning and classification systems for adult prisons; and drug use problems among methamphetamine users. She moved to Hong Kong in the 1990s, and has witnessed the development of the city’s drug market over the past two decades. Her recent projects include a study on how young people obtain their drugs and social supply, drug use and risks among young gay men, investment fraud, and social harms and service access for ethnic minority youth in Hong Kong. She sits on the editorial board of Contemporary Drug Problems and Feminist Criminology, and on the international associate editorial/advisory board of Punishment and Society and Criminology and Criminal Justice respectively. She serves as a member of the Hong Kong Law Reform Commission’s subcommittee in a review on laws and policies related to sexual offenses. Karen teaches criminology, social problems, and gender studies courses.

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Doing Gender and Why it Matters (edX)

Understand gendered realities through an in-depth consideration of "sex" and "gender" as cultural, social and legal phenomena impacting society and how they interact with structures of power and violence using an interdisciplinary lens. The course is a comparative, interdisciplinary and cross-sector conversation which encourages reflective thinking about practices of [...]