Please join either in person or online. For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm.

Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions or to receive the Microsoft Teams link.

Cybercriminals are an excellent example of a hidden population. To study them is a significant methodological challenge. But there is also a theoretical challenge: what is the relevance of a seemingly niche population to broader sociology? This talk addresses both of these challenges, by tracing the development of a line of my scholarly inquiry: the economic sociology of cybercrime. It includes three elements: 1) my entry into the field of cybercrime research with my fieldwork on organisation, cooperation and governance (Lusthaus, Industry of Anonymity, 2018); 2) insights from data collection involving 10 case analyses on closed cybercrime investigations; 3) the detailed analysis of specific case studies with the application of relevant theory from the economic sociology subfield.  

Biography:
Dr Jonathan Lusthaus is Director of The Human Cybercriminal Project and an Associate Professor in Global Sociology in the Department of Sociology. He is also a Research Fellow at Nuffield College, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at UNSW Canberra Cyber. Jonathan’s research focuses on the “human” side of profit-driven cybercrime: who cybercriminals are and how they are organised.