Our growing Criminology list takes a critical stance and features boundary-pushing work with innovative, research-led publications.
A particular focus of the list are books that engage with our global social challenges, both on a local and international level. We aim to publish books in a wide range of formats that will have real impact and shape public discourse.
This paper explores the criminological scientific community in Chile from 1990 to 2020. We use the sociology of scientific knowledge as a conceptual framework to apply to the Chilean criminology development stage. We analyse the criminological community using social network analysis based on the co-affiliation networks of researchers (N=62) affiliated with research centres, think tanks and universities producing criminological knowledge. We describe the actors involved in the network of researchers and identify the clusters shaping the main areas of the country’s production and dissemination of criminological research. The findings reveal a low density between scholars in the network; the existence of central research topics related to citizen security and criminal law; the presence of clusters (for example, juvenile justice and prison studies, among others), and areas that are emerging in the production of criminological knowledge in Chile (cybercrime, crimmigration). We conclude that criminology in Chile is still in the amateur stage. However, there are signs of growing professionalisation in the discipline.
Since its founding, Convict Criminology (CC) has evolved into an international approach, group, organisation, and network with a relatively coherent set of objectives. Although little thought was put into CC’s development beyond the US, the original intent of CC was primarily to develop a network of individuals who were united around its core ideas. Due to both the constraints of international travel for ex-convicts and the financial burden for people to travel, originally it made best sense for people interested in the CC perspective to meet at the local level. Over time, because of advances in telecommunication platforms like Facetime, Skype, and Zoom, members of the CC network realised that meeting face-to-face on a regular basis was not necessary. Thus, the importance of local or even national approaches to CC were not necessary. This paper briefly examines the international components of CC and the authors’ views that, while individual country groups of CC members may have been advantageous in the early stages of CC, it is no longer necessary, if not counterproductive.
The involvement of men in efforts to challenge men’s violence is a crucial component for eradicating gender-based violence (GBV) and for disrupting the continued responsibilisation of women and survivors for addressing the problem at various scales. But as men’s participation in the field has evolved and become increasingly professionalised, so tensions have emerged regarding what happens when men enter women-majority professional and movement anti-violence spaces. Via a feminist discourse analysis, this article explores how men active in the violence against women and girls (VAWG) sector and movement conceptualise and negotiate the challenges associated with the reproduction of patriarchal privilege in the context of their work or activism. Analysis points to how gender inequalities and masculine norms are both instrumentalised as well as entrenched, even when men ‘allies’ seek to challenge them. Moreover, findings indicate how men’s often elevated status in anti-violence practice and movement spaces can be used to resource a type of ‘entrepreneurial masculinity’ which obstructs structural change as regards gendered norms and expectations. This article offers an empirical and theoretical contribution to the expanding literature on men’s role(s) in the prevention of men’s violence against women and minoritised genders, and the ways in which gendered privilege operates therein.
Works of historical criminology do not have to be disinterested studies of past crime-related phenomena. Instead, they can represent practical attempts to intervene in the politics of crime and justice in the present. This article takes this claim to a critical conclusion; historical research in criminology can function as a weapon in contemporary political struggles and a way of injecting radical politics into criminological studies. To demonstrate this point, the article scrutinises the ways in which early critical criminologists in the US engaged in historical research as a way of doing politics and activism. To such criminologists, doing historical research was a form of praxis. Focusing on the works produced at the Berkeley School of Criminology in the 1970s, the article shows that the nurture of a historical interest was deemed to be a vital step in the development of a critical paradigm within American criminology.
This article explores the process of ‘identity erasure’ that is a feature of domestic violence and abuse. Data are taken from semi-structured narrative-style interviews with 14 women who had experienced abuse from a male partner.
I draw on Erving Goffman’s () work on ‘total institutions’. Goffman uses the term ‘mortification’ in describing the attacks on identity and self that occur in ‘total institutions’ such as psychiatric hospitals, prisons and concentration camps. These attacks take the form of: loss of contact with the outside world, ritual degradation, the removal of possessions, and lack of control. Their effect is to erase the inmate’s prior identity, and render them compliant.
For the women who participated in this study, their abusers attempted to achieve compliance by adopting many of the tactics that Goffman describes. Drawing on participants’ words, I discuss some of the behaviours adopted by their abusive partners: isolation from support networks, surveillance, deprivation of privacy, and dispossession. I argue that, for women, the home/abusive relationship becomes a total institution. Understanding the abusive household as a ‘total institution’ can help friends, family and professionals to more fully appreciate, and therefore provide women with more appropriate help to overcome, the barriers to leaving.
This article presents empirical findings from a British Academy funded project concerned to explore victim-survivor experiences of domestic violence disclosure schemes (DVDS) in the UK. In so doing it draws on the concept of responsibilisation as one way of making sense of the experiences reported. It goes on to suggest a note of caution for the development of these schemes in other jurisdictions, since the failure to take account of victim-survivor voices in relation to DVDS in the UK has contributed to such schemes rendering victim-survivors responsible.
A discipline takes on the contours of its context. Therefore, the sociology of science asks in what context science occurs and what implications it has for scientific findings. Worldwide, criminology exists as an independent science linked to sociology or law. What determines the dependency or independency of criminology? In this article, through archival research, I explore the emergence of critical criminology in Argentina. My goal is to explain why it emerged among scholars and practitioners of law, and I propose five reasons for this. All these reasons have as a background the fact that law in Argentina is, at least it was in the 1970s and 80s when critical criminology emerged, more sensitive to cultural, geographical, and historical-critical (and generalist) developments than social and behavioural sciences.
This research, part of a broader exploration of the sources of current Brazilian critical criminology, aims to map the canonical works in the field, especially the publications and research of the 1970s, in order to identify theoretical guidelines, methodological perspectives, and to which extent there is an alignment with the debate of the Global North. This exploration seeks to identify (a) the theoretical perspectives, (b) the empirical emphasis, (c) how gender and race issues were faced, and (d) whether the boundaries between criminology and criminal law were delimited in the general framework of criminal sciences. The conclusion presents a synthesis of the foundational methodological guidelines and the present state of critical criminology in Brazil.
