The travels of criminologies
Professor Máximo Sozzo
Professor of Sociology of Law and Criminology, National University of Litoral, Argentina
Leverhulme Visiting Professor, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
In the criminological field, the production of knowledge in certain "central" places - historically constituted as such in the framework of imperialism and colonialism in its various forms and dimensions - has become globally dominant. This has often been reflected in a dependency and subordination of researchers from "peripheral" contexts, which translated into forms of assimilation, reinforcing the claimed universality of "central" concepts and arguments.
However, these travels of criminologies also often took on more complex forms, in which what was imported was subjected to adaptations and rejections by "peripheral" researchers, giving rise to innovations of varying intensity. Exploring these metamorphoses of criminological vocabularies in "peripheral" contexts is an important part of the decolonial imperative of this field and implies both rewriting its history and redescribing its present landscape. This paper argues for the centrality of this task and presents some concrete examples from the remote and recent past as well as the present of criminologies in Latin America.
Emotional wasteland or compassionate renewal: Four challenges to the discipline
Professor Vanessa Barker
Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University, Editor in Chief of Punishment & Society.
In the past year, Sweden has introduced a new set of hard borders and harsh punishments in response to gangland shootings, the recruitment of ‘child soldiers’, increased insecurity, declining trust, rising inequality, and the perceived failings of a generation of immigrants to integrate into society. More prisons, more police, more punishments, and more politics. We have been here before. With over thirty years of social science research on the causes of crime, the efficacy of incarceration, and the social costs of mass imprisonment, as criminologists at once removed from the mechanics of policy making, we are all too familiar with the causes and consequences of such pursuits. Watching this turn in Sweden is like watching a train go off the rails in slow motion without being able to hit the switch or warn those in harm’s way. It is like a Greek tragedy, complete with its doomed heroes, its pain and suffering, but without its catharsis or compassion. Young people, particularly those who are racialized, who are or their parents are immigrants, are increasingly subjected to victimization and criminalization; they are experiencing higher levels of violence for which they are blamed and punished. As criminal justice comes for them, they are literally removed from society’s shared future, how we imagine it, how we will live it.
What is going on Sweden provides a compelling case to rethink the role of academics who study crime and punishment, particularly in a social world that seems to be unraveling. The stakes are high. What once was self-evident-- a society based on equality, mutual respect, interdependence--has become destabilized and fractured. Here and elsewhere, we face a collective challenge to work with those who are most likely to be victims of crime, violence, and those who are subjected to the force of law without its full protection or justice.
This paper uses the case of Sweden to reflect on a broader set of challenges to the discipline with a focus on questions about knowledge production, how we know what we know and what we do with it:
- Knowledge production: what is criminological knowledge for, for whom, and from where?
- Emancipation: How can criminology be part of an emancipatory project? Can the research identify or promote access to justice? For whom?
- Methodological pluralism: How can critical criminology increase its relevance and cultural cache through more creative methods and tools, including participatory methods and deliberation? Should it?
- Scales of criminology: how has mass mobility and de-territorialization changed the scale and scope of criminology? As its objects of study cross borders through local, national, global and transnational planes, how does justice travel? Can it? What is justice for nomads? Why would it matter?
Plenary: what is justice?
Scales of Justice | Sarah Armstrong
We cannot answer ‘What is justice?’ without considering questions about where and who. This talk argues for more deeply situating justice, and how we conceptualize and measure it, in a context of scale. That is, what justice means, and what it can mean, is contingent on spatial - whether it is a question of the individual, collective, national or global – and temporal qualities. I will be drawing on research and activism with and by families in Scotland who have experienced a death in custody. Their quest involves both a desire to share the full humanity of the people they have lost and a collective drive towards accountability of the state who has killed them. Their aims, ideas and methods contrast with what the state claims to offer through its own mechanisms of justice. My research on bureaucratic violence provides a lens to unpack the contradictions and tensions of state and family versions of justice, further revealing the ways the state attempts to absorb the latter. By arguing for attention to scale, and situatedness generally, I aim at undermining the monopoly that moral and political philosophy have historically enjoyed in theorizing justice, largely through a method of abstraction.
The Least of These: violence, black freedom and the possibility for a new world | Reuben Miller
Abstract: Rather than mitigate risk, our approach to violence and our efforts to separate ourselves from people who’ve caused harm, through policing and incarceration and myriad forms of political, social and economic exclusion, has hastened, and in fact ensured, that we live in a more violent future. We see this across the globe, from the million-dollar blocks and the gang, violent crime and especially the sex offense registries of the United States, to the fervor over knife crimes, joint enterprise crimes and “modern slavery” in England and Wales. Exclusion is a kind of violence that has the unfortunate effect of producing more violence in its wake. The least of these looks for a way out. We begin by examining how and why the needs of the racialized poor are so often misrecognized as threat, and end with a call to reimagine public safety and the role of government in our lives.
Plenary: Criminology as practice: who is criminology?
Service users; being used | Paula Harriet
People who have experienced the criminal justice system are an interesting group of individuals for researchers and are therefore much sought after as research participants. As the researched whilst a prisoner and beyond, it has become increasingly clear how critical it is to shine a light on the inequitable power dynamics inherent within researcher-participant relationships, and raise questions over the reciprocity and ethicality of research with people in prison
For instance, what and whose endeavour are we actually participating in, and what control do we exert over the final product? Who owns and profits from the knowledge that is produced through involvement in research? Whose voices and views are privileged in the discourse? What are the risks of for prisoners in charting vulnerabilities and pain? Especially when it is well-intentioned and with a view to reducing marginality, how and why does research and academia reserve its position as guardians of thought and place its research participants in the margins?
How might we avoid concerns that collective and personal experiences of pain are often being extracted and stolen, manipulated and repackaged, How might we drive towards knowledge equity and avoid injustice in our own work practice? Is there a better alternative? Is it possible to see research and involvement as a process of reciprocal relationships, which includes a recognition that prisoners interaction with the CJS is rarely a choice?
Neoliberal scholars: whose side can we be on? | Cara Jardine
This paper is concerned with how the contemporary university as an institution, and the associated working practices, shape the production of criminological knowledge. It argues that multiple epistemological positions are necessary to produce rich and useful criminological research, and examines how neoliberal pressures may serve to undermine the diversity of perspectives within the discipline, which in turn can limit our capacity to produce knowledge which speaks meaningfully to the concerns of marginalised social groups.
Plenary: Taking criminology public
Taking Criminology Public | Alistair Fraser
While discussions of public criminology have been alive for some time, it is notable that such debates have often taken place not in the public realm but behind the elaborate entry-systems of academic publishing. Conversely, public debate on crime has become populated by a cast of entrepreneurs and agitators who perform a type of non-academic criminology that exerts profound influence on public perceptions. At the same time, criminologists have increasingly carried the task and promise of public criminology into the world – in communities, schools, prisons and beyond. Against this backdrop we must question what it now means to take criminology public – asking not only what constitutes public criminology, but who it is for and where it is done.
Still more unfinished business: criminology, legitimacy and democratic hope | Richard Sparks
In the long years that have elapsed since Ian Loader and I wrote Public Criminology? (Loader and Sparks, 2010), many things have changed, but not quite everything. This paper briefly examines three persistent, though far from static, questions. As the objects of criminological inquiry change and diversify, how should our understanding of its public roles also shift? In that uncertain context, is there still a central place for interrogating the legitimate exercise of public powers? Can we foster spaces of deliberation on questions of order, security and justice that rekindle some sense of hope for democratic renewal?
Plenary: Criminology's relevance in times of transition
Apologies, Violence and the Criminology of Transition | Kieran McEvoy
Drawing on research conducted in over a dozen post conflict and post authoritarian societies, Kieran McEvoy will speak on role of criminology in transitional justice. In particular, his talk will focus on the intersection between criminology, law and human rights and the role of criminology as a framework to explore punishment and redress for past acts of extreme violence – focusing in particular on the role of apologies and acknowledgement.
Holding Absence: Russian Penal Culture and the Art of Intentional Forgetting | Laura Piacentini
The dearth of international criminological expertise in regions not sitting within the so-called Global North and Global South binary is becoming increasingly apparent and necessarily problematic in Criminology; and at a time when it is needed the most. One such nation is Russia, which is a striking omission given the Russian penal system was the largest penal culture of the twentieth century. In this short presentation Laura Piacentini examines this omission by situating nearly thirty years of conceptual and empirical work on Russian penal culture in a wider geo-carceral context of colonialism, war, political erasure and authoritarianism. Laura asks what next for Criminology now that Russia’s absence has re-emerged?