Introduction

Abstract

This collection showcases recent work by some of the members of the Uclan Cybercrime Research Unit (UCRU) at the University of Central Lancashire. It is fashionable these days to describe one’s academic work as ‘interdisciplinary’. The composition and work of UCRU, as the following chapters hopefully demonstrate, is genuinely interdisciplinary. Under my directorship, the UCRU was ‘born’ in December 2014 and has since rapidly expanded to become a well-known and well-regarded research unit in the field of cybercrime. UCRU is engaged in the production of publications, the development of continual professional development courses, knowledge transfer, income generation and consultancy. The unit serves to investigate emerging evidence of cybercrime and we are engaged in attempts to find new understandings of criminal behaviour across Internet platforms. One of our intentions is to inform social and educational policy-making, in tandem with cutting-edge research and theoretical development pertaining to online crime and deviancy. Whilst there is no collective philosophy in UCRU, members such as myself, Wayne Noble, Faye Speed and Jessica Marshall draw to some extent from my post-postmodern Genetic-Social, metatheoretical analysis (Owen 2012, 2014; Owen and Owen 2015), which attempts to bridge the gap between criminological theory, behavioural genetics, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience.