Miss Jana Macfarlane Horn

I commenced my PhD journey with The Open University in October 2021. Prior to starting my doctorate degree, I completed a BSc in Criminology at the University of Surrey, focussing especially on corporate crime and fraud.

During my studies there, I have collaborated in a project titled Joint Enterprise Appeal Project, working with the charity JENGbA (joint enterprise: not guilty by association) that entailed reviewing case documentation and evidence to establish whether there are enough grounds for starting the appeal process. This was limited to cases in which the ‘joint enterprise’ doctrine had been used to convict the co-defendants. As a result, the findings of my project have been used in a House of Commons debate.

After obtaining my first-class degree at Surrey, I have gained some professional experience as a fraud investigator which made me seek academia again. I then obtained an MRes degree in Criminology at University of Glasgow. This allowed me to write a project on corporate crime portrayals in online news, focussing on the content analysis of three national news outlets which inspired my current doctorate thesis.

My doctorate thesis focusses on three prominent corporate crime cases of the 21^st century: the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Rana Plaza building collapse, and the LIBOR manipulation. My aim is to study the discourses of corporate crime in ‘true crime’ media, such as documentaries and podcasts by employing a multimodal critical discourse analysis methodology. This will allow me to analyse textual, visual, and audio materials to establish what discourses are most prominent in each case and to compare how the discourses may differ between podcasts and documentaries. My hope is to contribute to bringing corporate crime to the forefront of criminological thought. 

Publications

Macfarlane Horn, J. (2022) Amazon: When a Crime is Not a Crime, The BSC Blog, Available at: https://thebscblog.wordpress.com/2022/04/13/amazon-when-a-crime-is-not-a-crime/ 

Macfarlane Horn, J. (2022) Book Review: Corporate Wrongdoing on Film, The 'Public be Damned.' Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime. https://doi.org/10.1177/2631309X221123226