Introduction: Celebrating the Career of Nigel South

This book celebrates the outstanding career of Nigel South, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Sociology and Criminology of the University of Essex and one of the leading figures in his field. Through his long career, still ongoing and flourishing, Nigel has contributed knowledge in many areas of criminological scholarship and also challenged the confines of the discipline, opening up new directions for thinking and debate. In this book, Nigel's close colleagues and friends celebrate his exceptional career through essays that draw on, or have been inspired by, his earlier or most recent work. Spanning across the areas of policing, drugs, green, southern, and sensory criminology, these essays offer cutting-edge research and fresh conceptual insights honouring the work of an outstanding criminologist, colleague, friend, and human being. In what follows, we offer a concise account of Nigel's extraordinary career and also introduce the structure of this book.