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In this short essay, I discuss two interrelated processes. First, I will address the marketization of British universities. Here, I claim that—despite appearing regularly in the public proclamations of government ministers and university leaders—the core ideals of the university no longer play a significant role in Britain’s higher education sector and rarely intrude upon the working lives of British academics. The university’s traditional telos was tied to the pursuit of truth and the expansion of human knowledge. However, only vague traces of the university’s grand ideals can now be found throughout large expanses of Britain’s university system. These traces take a ghostly form: their substance appropriated, these ghosts attempt but are unable to exhort an influence upon unfolding social reality (as originally discussed in Derrida 2006). Only flickering representations of the university’s grand ideals remain. In their true form, these ideals are for the most part consigned to the realm of memory, and with every passing year seem at ever-greater risk of being forgotten completely.

The overriding aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework that can be used to systematically examine the victimisation from environmental or green crime. By analysing the conceptual and pragmatic compatibilities between two distinctive academic fields of green criminology and human security (HS) and by discussing the impacts of timber trafficking on HS, it is argued that it would be logical, achievable and fruitful to employ a broad HS perspective to advance the understanding of the mechanism of green victimisation with a focus on human victims.

Our work contributes through a cultural criminological perspective to a contextualised knowledge of street violence and its constructed meanings; uncertainty, familiarity and strangeness in spaces of urban disadvantage as perceived by Scottish white youths are examined. Youth criminal and anti-social behaviour associated with knife-carrying is widely reported and structures political and media discourses which classify street culture. In our article we argue that a particular symbolic construction of social space, as experienced and constructed by weapon-carrying young white men in Glasgow, informs the landscape of violence judged in terms of official statistics and fear of crime. Signal crime theory as a particular type of cultural criminology affords insights about why weapons are carried. Links with a hierarchical codification of consumer culture inform the findings and resonate with the penetration of capitalism in the lives of the marginalised street youth.