Punggawa Social Inquiry: Journal of Crime, Culture, and Social Dynamics is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that publishes research across the social sciences and humanities. The journal provides a broad scholarly platform for examining society, culture, institutions, communities, human behavior, language, economy, politics, public life, and processes of social transformation from diverse theoretical, empirical, comparative, historical, critical, and interdisciplinary perspectives.

The journal is organized around three interconnected thematic domains: Crime, Culture, and Social Dynamics. These domains provide an intellectual framework for the journal rather than restrictive disciplinary boundaries. Manuscripts may address one domain independently or explore relationships across two or more domains.

Crime

This domain covers crime, violence, victimization, justice, punishment, security, and social control as socially and institutionally situated phenomena. Its principal areas include:

• criminology, crime, criminal behavior, and patterns of offending;
• victimology, victimization, vulnerability, fear of crime, trauma, stigma, resilience, and recovery;
• penology, punishment, policing, surveillance, criminal justice, corrections, and social control;
• organized, political, corporate, transnational, environmental, rural, urban, and digital crime;
• youth offending, gender-based violence, domestic violence, interpersonal violence, homicide, and community conflict;
• structural violence, institutional violence, social harm, inequality, and marginalization;
• crime prevention, security, community responses, and public perceptions of crime;
• law, society, justice, deviance, and the social consequences of legal and penal institutions.

Culture

This domain examines the production, negotiation, communication, and transformation of meaning, identity, language, morality, knowledge, representation, and social boundaries. Its principal areas include:

• cultural practices, traditions, rituals, heritage, local knowledge, everyday life, and popular culture;
• identity, ethnicity, race, nationality, citizenship, migration, diaspora, and belonging;
• religion, morality, values, honour, shame, dignity, ethics, and normative change;
• gender, sexuality, embodiment, class, status, generation, and social identity;
• deviance, labelling, stigma, stereotyping, moral panic, social boundaries, and contested belonging;
• media, communication, representation, collective memory, cultural production, and cultural transformation;
• linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse studies, language and society, multilingualism, and language policy;
• language, identity, ideology, power, digital discourse, media discourse, and communication practices;
• history, memory, knowledge production, intellectual traditions, and changing interpretations of social and cultural experience;
• literature, narrative, texts, and other forms of cultural expression when examined in relation to society, identity, discourse, representation, or social change.

Social Dynamics

This domain examines how societies, institutions, communities, economies, political systems, and human relationships are organized and transformed through power, inequality, governance, development, collective action, technological change, mobility, and environmental transformation. Its principal areas include:

• power, authority, legitimacy, governance, politics, public policy, citizenship, and political participation;
• public administration, institutions, bureaucracy, public services, and institutional change;
• economics, development economics, political economy, economic sociology, economic behavior, labor, markets, and economic inequality;
• business, management, entrepreneurship, organizational studies, employment, workplace relations, and organizational behavior;
• accounting, finance, financial behavior, and business practices when examined in their broader social, institutional, developmental, organizational, or policy contexts;
• poverty, precarity, welfare, social protection, development, marginalization, discrimination, and inequality;
• community, family, youth, social networks, organizations, associations, and institutional life;
• social movements, resistance, political participation, collective action, civil society, and social activism;
• education, learning, educational institutions, educational policy, inequality in education, and social dimensions of teaching and learning;
• psychology and social psychology, including human behavior, attitudes, identity, well-being, interpersonal relations, and psychosocial dimensions of social life;
• work, employment, welfare, public services, social justice, inclusion, empowerment, and community development;
• communication, media, technology, platforms, artificial intelligence, digital culture, and digital society;
• migration, mobility, urban and rural transformation, demographic change, spatial relations, and human geography;
• environment, sustainability, disasters, climate-related social change, environmental justice, and relationships between communities and their environments;
• globalization, international relations, regional transformation, development, and transnational social processes.

Interdisciplinary Orientation

Punggawa Social Inquiry welcomes contributions from a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, including sociology, anthropology, political science, public policy, public administration, governance studies, criminology, criminal justice studies, communication and media studies, cultural studies, linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, history, education, psychology, social psychology, economics, development economics, political economy, business and organizational studies, development studies, gender studies, social welfare and social work, law and society, international studies, religious studies, human geography, environmental studies, environmental humanities, and related fields across the social sciences and humanities.

The journal welcomes quantitative, qualitative, mixed-method, comparative, historical, ethnographic, interpretive, critical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary research, as well as other methodologically rigorous forms of social-scientific and humanistic inquiry.

A manuscript does not need to address crime or criminology to fall within the journal's scope. Research focusing primarily on social, political, cultural, linguistic, educational, psychological, economic, institutional, historical, developmental, communicative, organizational, environmental, or other humanistic questions is equally welcome when it contributes to a substantive understanding of society, culture, institutions, human experience, or social transformation.

Accordingly, Crime, Culture, and Social Dynamics should be understood as interconnected intellectual domains rather than mandatory elements that every manuscript must address. This broad orientation allows Punggawa Social Inquiry to serve as an inclusive scholarly platform for researchers across the social sciences and humanities while retaining a distinctive intellectual identity centred on the relationships among crime, culture, power, institutions, language, economy, and social change.