PhD Candidate
Emma Shakespeare is a PhD candidate in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University. Her doctoral research examines frontline interactions between police officers and sovereign citizens through a procedural justice lens. Using police body-worn camera footage and a systematic social observation (SSO) approach, her thesis provides one of the first empirical analyses of how these encounters unfold in real time. Emma has presented her research at the 2025 European Society of Criminology Annual Conference.
Alongside her PhD, Emma works in the Cybercrime Prevention team at the Australian Federal Police within the Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordination Centre (JPC3). She is committed to strengthening the connection between academic research and operational policing, with a focus on producing insights that directly inform practice and policy.
Emma is also an experienced sessional academic, tutoring various courses including Introduction to Criminology and Criminal Justice, Counter Terrorism Law, and Fraud and Cybercrime.
Research Topic
Policing Sovereign Citizens: Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Dynamics of Anti-Authority Encounters
Supervisors
Professor Kristina Murphy
Associate Professor Keiran Hardy
Areas of interest
Sovereign citizens and conspiracy theorists
Policing
Procedural justice
Video data analysis / SSO
Cybercrime prevention
Membership
Publications
Shakespeare, E., Hardy, K., & Murphy, K. (2025, August 27). Why are police a target for sovereign citizen violence? The Conversation.
Murphy, K., Cherney, A., Hardy, K., Sas, S., & Shakespeare, E. (2025). Linking Conspiracy Beliefs and Violent Anti-Government Extremism: Mitigating the Threat with Procedurally Just Governance. Terrorism and Political Violence, 1-24.
Our People
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice have the largest community of criminologists in Australia