Professor Lesley McAra delivers the Nigel Walker Lecture at the University of Cambridge

Professor Lesley McAra gave the Nigel Walker Lecture at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge on 22 May 2025. The annual lecture is one of the Institute’s most significant events, honouring the life and legacy of Professor Nigel Walker, a key figure in the development of criminology as an academic discipline in the United Kingdom and former Director of the Institute at Cambridge.  

In her lecture, entitled 'Justice in an Age of Unreason', Professor McAra explored the underlying drivers of transformation in penal policy and their longer term impacts on the lives of those who come into conflict with the law. She highlighted the ways in which criminological research and scholarly activism can make a significant contribution to the conditions necessary to support more just social orders, foregrounding the ongoing impact of the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime on policy and practice.  

Professor McAra said: "I was deeply honoured to be invited to give the Nigel Walker lecture.  It was an opportunity to showcase the ways in which criminological research can bring illumination to critical questions about crime reduction and young people’s wellbeing. At a time of great precarity in higher education it was an opportunity also to demonstrate that criminology as a discipline really matters."