ROUNDTABLE Unpacking the journey of a criminology student: an invitation to a dialogue
Tracks
Track 2
| Thursday, July 11, 2024 |
| 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM |
| Conference Room 5 (TIC) |
Speaker
Dr Alexandra Cox
Associate Professor
University Of Reading
Unpacking the journey of a criminology student: an invitation to a dialogue
Abstract
Are the concepts of crime and the criminal - with their evocations of the punitive, incidental and individual - still useful? As a group of criminologists starting a new undergraduate degree programme in criminology, we have been thinking about the ways that the typical journey of an undergraduate criminology student might reinforce certain normative assumptions about 'crime' and the 'criminal.' That journey often starts with key concepts about offending and crime and is corrected along its course through attention to the ‘hidden’ crimes of structural inequality or the ‘hidden’ criminal actions of the state-corporation assemblage – all the while wedding us to the idea that ‘crime’ and ‘criminal’ are still useful concepts for complex realities.
But can this fixation on the individual and incidental still aid us in the study of criminology? What would an inverse journey through the discipline look like, one where the interested ask questions of structure, violence and harm and then correct any risk of abstraction through attention to the everyday, situated and, yes, perhaps, personal? These questions are useful to pose but they are not tools or answers in their own right. What tools remain then for pedagogical approaches to teaching criminology?
Our discussion was prompted by a reading of Stanley Cohen’s 1979 essay 'The Last Seminar,' which has been described as a fable, conveying a moral and ethical message about the state of academic criminological thought in the 1970s. Cohen seems to flee the perils of positivism through writing criminology into fiction and archetype – “there was nothing more an intellectual could do”, he writes. We turn here too to Sarah Burton’s reflections on the productive metaphor or hieroglyph of ‘white theory boy’ to address the skew of social theory towards white men from Europe/North America. “The 'white theory boy' is essentially personification without individualization” writes Burton.
What metaphors or hieroglyphs might exist to allow us to personalize the problems that criminology addresses? Perhaps must we become more creative – and perhaps less positivistic – as a discipline. This roundtable focuses on a key question, using Stanley Cohen's essay as a touchstone: is there a need to challenge the typical approaches to teaching criminology, from 'criminal' to 'corporation'? How can creative methods and approaches play a role in this approach?
But can this fixation on the individual and incidental still aid us in the study of criminology? What would an inverse journey through the discipline look like, one where the interested ask questions of structure, violence and harm and then correct any risk of abstraction through attention to the everyday, situated and, yes, perhaps, personal? These questions are useful to pose but they are not tools or answers in their own right. What tools remain then for pedagogical approaches to teaching criminology?
Our discussion was prompted by a reading of Stanley Cohen’s 1979 essay 'The Last Seminar,' which has been described as a fable, conveying a moral and ethical message about the state of academic criminological thought in the 1970s. Cohen seems to flee the perils of positivism through writing criminology into fiction and archetype – “there was nothing more an intellectual could do”, he writes. We turn here too to Sarah Burton’s reflections on the productive metaphor or hieroglyph of ‘white theory boy’ to address the skew of social theory towards white men from Europe/North America. “The 'white theory boy' is essentially personification without individualization” writes Burton.
What metaphors or hieroglyphs might exist to allow us to personalize the problems that criminology addresses? Perhaps must we become more creative – and perhaps less positivistic – as a discipline. This roundtable focuses on a key question, using Stanley Cohen's essay as a touchstone: is there a need to challenge the typical approaches to teaching criminology, from 'criminal' to 'corporation'? How can creative methods and approaches play a role in this approach?
