Dr Orlando Goodall

I am a member of the Criminology team at the University of Plymouth with a research and teaching focus on Green Criminology. My interests span the critical social sciences.

My current empirical focus brings together the sociology of wildlife persecution, food fraud and rural enterprise misconduct.

In addition to my research I have ongoing interests in geopolitical conflict and political corruption from a state crime position, philosophy of social science, historical materialism and critical realism, and the history and sociology of punishment. 

I have worked for Penny Green at the International State Crime Initiative (as research assistant for the ESRC funded project; State Crime and Civil Activism: On the Dialectics of Repression and Resistance (Green and Ward, 2019) and was a regular attendee of seminars with Roy Bhaskar at the UCL IOE. 

My research is the first sustained empirical exploration of illegal deer taking and rural enterprise food crimes in the U.K. My long-term project is the reconceptualisation of the persecution of wildlife. 

The international society for the study of rural crime. 

The critical realist network of crime, security and justice.

I am module lead for three modules:

Critical Issues in Criminal Justice (Level 4)

This module equips students with the means to interrogate pressing political and social issues that impact society, such as austerity and privatization. With a principle focus on David Garland's classic work (2001), students learn about the emergence of the new penology (technocratic managerialism) and the new punitiveness (penal populism) as distinct but inter-related parallel tendencies of justice and penal policy. Their unanticipated and unplanned historical emergence from a contradictory basis of inconsistent neoliberal political economic conditions is a main focus of the module. 

Global (In)securities and the State (Level 6)

This module is based around the module leaders experiences working at the International State Crime Initiative. A critical, dialectical, state crime framework is elaborated while taking in an array of major historical events. Atrocity crimes, intentional human rights violations and the marginalisation, dehumanization and persecution of victims is a focus of the module. As is the failure of the international community, global structures and traditional criminology to answer for these most pressing of problems. The module is post-disciplinary and includes elements of security studies, international relations, criminology of war and global state crime.  

Green Criminology (Level 6)

This module brings students a unique way of understanding contemporary crimes and harms against nature and non-human species. The module leaders own extended fieldwork is used to theorise the problems relating to fauna, rural and food crimes. Critical theories are adopted to frame issues at the macro level, such as the Metabolic Rift and the Treadmill of Crime frameworks. More concretely the module leaders own novel conceptual frameworks from his published work helps students to think innovatively and critically about the antagonisms between human society and nature. 

This module uniquely benefits from the insights and expertise of senior level expert practitioners who give guest lectures. Accordingly, speakers include investigators from the National Wildlife Crime Unit, Devon and Cornwall Rural and Wildlife Crime police officers, Environmental Health inspectors, the Bat Conservation Trust and others. 

I guest lecture in criminological theory, sustainable development and postgraduate rural crime. 

Research interests:

The organisational characteristics and social contexts of animal, rural and food enterprise based illicit activity. The application of critical realism to research questions with a focus on the inter-play between agents / dispositions, strategy / opportunities, and macro-structural conditions. A critical reading of rural crime and the recentring of wildlife crime analysis in internal and external social relations.

Publications:

Goodall, O. (2025). The Lynmouth Flood Disaster as a ‘Rural Enterprise Metabolic Rift’ and Securitising Rural Regions Against Future Hazards of Planetary Collapse. International Journal of Rural Criminology, 9(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.18061/ijrc.v9i1.9624

Goodall, O., Smith, R., (2025). On the creation and extraction of illicit value from the rural environment: An ethnographic study of two ‘Organised Criminal Businesses’. In Bosworth, G., Chapman, P., Newbery, R., Steiner, A., and Webber, D.J. [Eds], Rural Entrepreneurship: Harvesting New Ideas and Sowing New Seeds, ISBE Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research Series. Vol 20, 187-201.https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/s2040-7246202520

Goodall, O. (2023). The Rural Enterprise Crime Complex: 'Undefendable Rural Space' and the Threat from the Fortress Farm. Crime, Law and Social Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-023-10084-z 

Goodall, O. (2021). Rural criminal collaborations and the food crimes of the countryside: realist social relations theory of illicit venison production. Crime, Law and Social Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-021-09976-9

Goodall, O. (2021). The Reality of Rural Crime: The unintended consequences of rural policy in the co-production of badger persecution and the illegal taking of deer, The British Journal of Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azaa095

Goodall, O. (2020). Beyond Wildlife Crime: Towards the concept of 'mundane fauna crime'. Criminology and Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895820981603

Other academic activities:

Founding member of the Critical Realist Crime, Justice and Security Network. 

2022 winner of the International Society of Rural Criminology, New Scholar award, for outstanding contributions to rural crime and justice.