Dear AoIR community, I would like to invite expressions of interest and extended abstracts for a proposed panel on Digital Criminology for the upcoming AoIR conference. Digital criminology has emerged as a productive interdisciplinary framework for examining how digital infrastructures, platforms, data practices, and algorithmic systems reshape crime, harm, justice, and regimes of control. Importantly, this field moves beyond narrow understandings of "cybercrime" as purely online offending, instead conceptualizing criminalization, victimization, governance, and illicit economies as deeply hybrid socio-technical processes, entangled across online/offline environments. In the context of internet research, digital criminology offers a particularly valuable lens for addressing core AoIR concerns: platform power, visibility and surveillance, mediated governance, digital cultures of harm, and the methodological challenges of studying sensitive or encrypted online spaces. This panel aims to bring together scholars working at the intersection of internet studies, criminology, media and communication research, digital sociology, and related fields to explore how digitalization reconfigures criminological phenomena and how internet researchers can contribute to these debates. Possible themes include (but are not limited to): Platform-mediated illicit economies (e.g., darknet markets, encrypted channels, social media drug trade) Digital harms, harassment, extremist networks, and online victimization Datafication, surveillance, and algorithmic governance in policing and justice Visibility regimes, infrastructures of control, and platform moderation practices AI, automation, and bias in criminological decision-making systems Methodological reflections: digital ethnography, computational approaches, research ethics in high-risk online fields Cultural meanings of crime and harm in online communities and digital publics Submission process & timeline To assemble the panel proposal, I kindly invite colleagues to submit an extended abstract (1000–1200 words), prepared in accordance with AoIR guidelines. Deadline for extended abstracts: 24 February 2026 Notification of acceptance for the panel: 26 February 2026 Final panel submission to AoIR (by organizer): 1 March 2026 Please send your extended abstract or expression of interest to: piotr.siuda@gmail.com -- *Piotr Siuda* (PhD, Professor of Media Studies) piotrsiuda.com Faculty of Cultural Studies Department of Game Studies and Digital Culture Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland Associate Editor, *Journal of Creative Communication *(SAGE Journals) *Recent papers:* *-- **Ghosted by the drug trade: A digital ethnography of absence, ethics, and epistemic friction on Tinder**, Crime, Media, Culture**.* *-- **Digital drug trading ecologies in context: Technological, geographic, and linguistic variation across darknet platforms*, *International Journal of Drug Policy.* -- *Navigating community-transaction and egalitarian-hierarchy divides: redefining virtual communities in the darknet drug trade and beyond*, *Information, Communication & Society.*