Lois Presser
Biographic Data
| ID | 162900 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lois Presser |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lois |
| FAMILY NAME | Presser |
| SIGNATURE | PRESSER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tennessee at Knoxville |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7736-8805 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 424 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Narrating violent victimization by positioning self and others
Victimologists observe that telling one’s story can foster healing for survivors of violence. To understand these processes better, victims’ narratives must be understood as situated acts of telling. This paper takes one man’s narration of victimization long past — child abuse and rape — as a case. We examined his interview-derived storytelling with a focus on narrative positioning, narrative discourse modes, and negations. We found that Stefan (…
A Spider on Your Shoulder”
We theorize workplace sexual harassment in terms of narrative. Two case studies – one at Ford Motor Company plants, the other involving former New York State governor Andrew Cuomo – ground thematic analysis of victims’ accounts of experiences of harassment and commentary on their capacity to give accounts. We identify six challenges - features of workplace harassment and its social context - that victims face in narrating harassment, which facili…
Narratology, applied
Criminology is foundationally an applied discipline, or one whose knowledge seeks to shape some non-academic practice. Narratives – particularly the narratives of parties to ‘crime’ – are essential to criminology, but criminologists have hardly engaged with narratology. This paper tracks the progression from traditional narrative research involving harm agents and criminalized persons to a relatively new narrative criminology that is attentive to…
Some like it HOT
Transportation in the United States is a deeply and intricately racialized system. In this paper, we use Seiler’s ideas regarding the racialization of mobility and Henricks and Seamster’s theory of the racial tax state, in conjunction with Presser’s analysis of the unsaid, to explain high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) to high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane conversions in U.S. metropolitan areas. We argue that silence on race in the major push for HOV to HOT…
Unsaid
Unsaid
Harm takes shape in and through what is suppressed, left out, or taken for granted. This book is a guide to understanding and uncovering what is left unsaid—whether concealed or silenced, presupposed or excluded. Drawing on a variety of real-world examples, narrative criminologist Lois Presser outlines how to determine what or who is excluded from textual materials. With strategies that can be added to the tool kits of social researchers and acti…
Why We Harm
Criminologists are primarily concerned with the analysis of actions that violate existing laws. But a growing number have begun analyzing crimes as actions that inflict harm, regardless of the applicability of legal sanctions. Even as they question standard definitions of crime as law-breaking, scholars of crime have few theoretical frameworks with which to understand the etiology of harmful action. In Why We Harm , Lois Presser scrutinizes accou…
Not a Real Prostitute”
Narrative Criminology as Critical Criminology
Inside Story
Stories have persuasive powers: they can influence how a person thinks and acts. Inside Story explores the capacity of stories to direct our thinking, heighten our emotions, and thereby motivate people to do harm to others and to tolerate harm done by others. From terrorist violence to “mere” complacency with institutionalized harm, the book weds case study to cross-disciplinary theory. It builds upon timely work in the field of narrative crimino…
Narrating Mother Identities From Prison
Incarcerated mothers face challenges to mothering in prison, including restricted opportunities to perform parenting tasks, ambiguous loss, and a compromised parenting identity. This study uses interviews with incarcerated mothers in the United States to explore how such women negotiate motherhood. All of the women grappled with how to care for their children from prison and projected futures that they hoped to experience as mothers. They varied …
Life as a Reflexive Project
This paper is concerned with the ways that vegans and meat-eaters talk about themselves and their dietary practices. Data from a total of 81 semi-structured interviews with ethical vegans (n = 21) and meat-eaters (n = 60) were analyzed for themes and discursive strategies, and results were compared. Vegans insisted that nonhuman animals had interests of their own and spoke of making consumption choices. Meat-eaters tended to reduce animals to hum…
Harmful Societies
Criminology and the narrative turn
This paper situates narrative criminology within criminology and the academy at large. Narrative criminologists ask how narratives, particularly narratives of the self, influence criminal and other harmful action. The idea that our stories shape our experiences is well developed in the humanities (literature, philosophy) and in the social sciences (anthropology, history, psychology, sociology). However, criminologists have caught on to that idea …
Introduction
Narrative Criminology
Institutionalizing Harm in Tennessee
What discourses render harm to nonhumans a right? In this article we consider the case of Tennessee's Senate Joint Resolution 30, which proposed to grant citizens "the personal right to hunt and fish." To clarify the institutional logics legitimizing such harm, we analyzed the text of the Resolution as well as statements by politicians and others leading up to the passage of the amendment the Resolution would enact. Logics that supported the Reso…
Getting on top through mass murder
This paper makes a case for narrative criminology by describing the storied nature of mass murder by Jim David Adkisson in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. Drawing on interviews with and writings by David, I suggest that his narrated identity was central to his violence. The ways in which he conjured himself, his personal and political situation, and despised others, animated his felt compulsion to do harm. In David’s story he simultaneously asserted (…
An autoethnography of hunting
Collecting and Analyzing the Stories of Offenders
The stories of offenders are invaluable for detailing the meanings that people give to their own violations. One would expect a broad knowledge base of methods for collecting and analyzing such stories, but no such thing currently exists. This article attempts to fill that gap, drawing on my own and others' research experiences. Research practice depends on the way that a researcher conceptualizes both narrative and offender, so I pay careful att…
Violence
The narratives of offenders
Although criminologists have long used the offender's own story to shed light on crime and its possible causes, they have not plumbed its potential as an explanatory variable. This article considers the way narrative has been conceptualized in criminology and the way that it might be re-conceptualized, following scholarship in other social sciences and in humanities, as a key instigator of action. The concept of narrative is useful for the projec…
Division of eco-friendly household labor and the marital relationship
Qualitative interviews were conducted with both members of 12 married couples who had made a commitment to environmentalism in their everyday lives. Women in the sample generally performed more eco-friendly domestic labor than did their husbands. The article focuses on husbands' and wives' accounts for the unintended gender injustice that came with efforts at environmental justice. These accounts stressed that men intended to do their share of th…
I'll Come Back and Stalk You
In this article, I analyze conflicts between advocacy and research on offenders and specifically male offenders. The analysis is based on the contradictory investments I had as a female researcher and an advocate during Kevin's final months on death row until his execution. My activism on Kevin's behalf facilitated research access. The interviews provided Kevin with a rare forum for enacting a powerful masculine self, a demonstration that eventua…
The Micropolitics of Victim-Offender Mediation
Victim-offender mediation is one of the most widely used practices of restorative justice encounter in the United States. We report findings from research on a victim-offender mediation program sponsored by an American juvenile court. Our specific concern is with power relations at the micro level of the mediation session. Restorative justice has been alternately criticized for controlling its participants too much and for controlling them too li…
The narratives of offenders
Although criminologists have long used the offender's own story to shed light on crime and its possible causes, they have not plumbed its potential as an explanatory variable. This article considers the way narrative has been conceptualized in criminology and the way that it might be re-conceptualized, following scholarship in other social sciences and in humanities, as a key instigator of action. The concept of narrative is useful for the projec…
Violent Offenders, Moral Selves
This article considers the research interview as a site for the construction of identities. In recent decades, identity has been conceptualized as something forged through the telling of life stories. To the extent that storytelling is a situated process, self-identification is as well. Using data from qualitative interviews with men who perpetrated violent crimes, I describe the narrated identities of these men, and clarify ways in which the men…
Negotiating Power and Narrative in Research
Criminology and the narrative turn
This paper situates narrative criminology within criminology and the academy at large. Narrative criminologists ask how narratives, particularly narratives of the self, influence criminal and other harmful action. The idea that our stories shape our experiences is well developed in the humanities (literature, philosophy) and in the social sciences (anthropology, history, psychology, sociology). However, criminologists have caught on to that idea …
Narrative Criminology as Critical Criminology
Getting on top through mass murder
This paper makes a case for narrative criminology by describing the storied nature of mass murder by Jim David Adkisson in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. Drawing on interviews with and writings by David, I suggest that his narrated identity was central to his violence. The ways in which he conjured himself, his personal and political situation, and despised others, animated his felt compulsion to do harm. In David’s story he simultaneously asserted (…
Harmful Societies
The Micropolitics of Victim-Offender Mediation
Victim-offender mediation is one of the most widely used practices of restorative justice encounter in the United States. We report findings from research on a victim-offender mediation program sponsored by an American juvenile court. Our specific concern is with power relations at the micro level of the mediation session. Restorative justice has been alternately criticized for controlling its participants too much and for controlling them too li…
An autoethnography of hunting
Narrating Mother Identities From Prison
Incarcerated mothers face challenges to mothering in prison, including restricted opportunities to perform parenting tasks, ambiguous loss, and a compromised parenting identity. This study uses interviews with incarcerated mothers in the United States to explore how such women negotiate motherhood. All of the women grappled with how to care for their children from prison and projected futures that they hoped to experience as mothers. They varied …
Introduction
Not a Real Prostitute”
Division of eco-friendly household labor and the marital relationship
Qualitative interviews were conducted with both members of 12 married couples who had made a commitment to environmentalism in their everyday lives. Women in the sample generally performed more eco-friendly domestic labor than did their husbands. The article focuses on husbands' and wives' accounts for the unintended gender injustice that came with efforts at environmental justice. These accounts stressed that men intended to do their share of th…
Third‐Party Policing and Insurance
This paper examines a relatively new trend: market‐based crime prevention. The insurance firm is an exemplary agent of this new type of crime prevention. Although the traditional focus of insurance has been on losses sustained after a crime or other catastrophe, we explore the shift from reactive to proactive crime management by the insurance industry. This trend is part of a more general decentralization of policing, from state‐controlled agents…
A Spider on Your Shoulder”
We theorize workplace sexual harassment in terms of narrative. Two case studies – one at Ford Motor Company plants, the other involving former New York State governor Andrew Cuomo – ground thematic analysis of victims’ accounts of experiences of harassment and commentary on their capacity to give accounts. We identify six challenges - features of workplace harassment and its social context - that victims face in narrating harassment, which facili…
Restorative justice and offender screening
Third‐Party Policing and Insurance
This paper examines a relatively new trend: market‐based crime prevention. The insurance firm is an exemplary agent of this new type of crime prevention. Although the traditional focus of insurance has been on losses sustained after a crime or other catastrophe, we explore the shift from reactive to proactive crime management by the insurance industry. This trend is part of a more general decentralization of policing, from state‐controlled agents…
Violent Offenders, Moral Selves
This article considers the research interview as a site for the construction of identities. In recent decades, identity has been conceptualized as something forged through the telling of life stories. To the extent that storytelling is a situated process, self-identification is as well. Using data from qualitative interviews with men who perpetrated violent crimes, I describe the narrated identities of these men, and clarify ways in which the men…
Negotiating Power and Narrative in Research
I'll Come Back and Stalk You
In this article, I analyze conflicts between advocacy and research on offenders and specifically male offenders. The analysis is based on the contradictory investments I had as a female researcher and an advocate during Kevin's final months on death row until his execution. My activism on Kevin's behalf facilitated research access. The interviews provided Kevin with a rare forum for enacting a powerful masculine self, a demonstration that eventua…
The Micropolitics of Victim-Offender Mediation
Victim-offender mediation is one of the most widely used practices of restorative justice encounter in the United States. We report findings from research on a victim-offender mediation program sponsored by an American juvenile court. Our specific concern is with power relations at the micro level of the mediation session. Restorative justice has been alternately criticized for controlling its participants too much and for controlling them too li…
Division of eco-friendly household labor and the marital relationship
Qualitative interviews were conducted with both members of 12 married couples who had made a commitment to environmentalism in their everyday lives. Women in the sample generally performed more eco-friendly domestic labor than did their husbands. The article focuses on husbands' and wives' accounts for the unintended gender injustice that came with efforts at environmental justice. These accounts stressed that men intended to do their share of th…
The narratives of offenders
Although criminologists have long used the offender's own story to shed light on crime and its possible causes, they have not plumbed its potential as an explanatory variable. This article considers the way narrative has been conceptualized in criminology and the way that it might be re-conceptualized, following scholarship in other social sciences and in humanities, as a key instigator of action. The concept of narrative is useful for the projec…
Collecting and Analyzing the Stories of Offenders
The stories of offenders are invaluable for detailing the meanings that people give to their own violations. One would expect a broad knowledge base of methods for collecting and analyzing such stories, but no such thing currently exists. This article attempts to fill that gap, drawing on my own and others' research experiences. Research practice depends on the way that a researcher conceptualizes both narrative and offender, so I pay careful att…
Violence
An autoethnography of hunting
Getting on top through mass murder
This paper makes a case for narrative criminology by describing the storied nature of mass murder by Jim David Adkisson in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. Drawing on interviews with and writings by David, I suggest that his narrated identity was central to his violence. The ways in which he conjured himself, his personal and political situation, and despised others, animated his felt compulsion to do harm. In David’s story he simultaneously asserted (…
Institutionalizing Harm in Tennessee
What discourses render harm to nonhumans a right? In this article we consider the case of Tennessee's Senate Joint Resolution 30, which proposed to grant citizens "the personal right to hunt and fish." To clarify the institutional logics legitimizing such harm, we analyzed the text of the Resolution as well as statements by politicians and others leading up to the passage of the amendment the Resolution would enact. Logics that supported the Reso…
Narrative Criminology
Criminology and the narrative turn
This paper situates narrative criminology within criminology and the academy at large. Narrative criminologists ask how narratives, particularly narratives of the self, influence criminal and other harmful action. The idea that our stories shape our experiences is well developed in the humanities (literature, philosophy) and in the social sciences (anthropology, history, psychology, sociology). However, criminologists have caught on to that idea …
Introduction
Harmful Societies
Inside Story
Stories have persuasive powers: they can influence how a person thinks and acts. Inside Story explores the capacity of stories to direct our thinking, heighten our emotions, and thereby motivate people to do harm to others and to tolerate harm done by others. From terrorist violence to “mere” complacency with institutionalized harm, the book weds case study to cross-disciplinary theory. It builds upon timely work in the field of narrative crimino…
Narrating Mother Identities From Prison
Incarcerated mothers face challenges to mothering in prison, including restricted opportunities to perform parenting tasks, ambiguous loss, and a compromised parenting identity. This study uses interviews with incarcerated mothers in the United States to explore how such women negotiate motherhood. All of the women grappled with how to care for their children from prison and projected futures that they hoped to experience as mothers. They varied …
Life as a Reflexive Project
This paper is concerned with the ways that vegans and meat-eaters talk about themselves and their dietary practices. Data from a total of 81 semi-structured interviews with ethical vegans (n = 21) and meat-eaters (n = 60) were analyzed for themes and discursive strategies, and results were compared. Vegans insisted that nonhuman animals had interests of their own and spoke of making consumption choices. Meat-eaters tended to reduce animals to hum…
Not a Real Prostitute”
Narrative Criminology as Critical Criminology
Why We Harm
Criminologists are primarily concerned with the analysis of actions that violate existing laws. But a growing number have begun analyzing crimes as actions that inflict harm, regardless of the applicability of legal sanctions. Even as they question standard definitions of crime as law-breaking, scholars of crime have few theoretical frameworks with which to understand the etiology of harmful action. In Why We Harm , Lois Presser scrutinizes accou…
Unsaid
Unsaid
Harm takes shape in and through what is suppressed, left out, or taken for granted. This book is a guide to understanding and uncovering what is left unsaid—whether concealed or silenced, presupposed or excluded. Drawing on a variety of real-world examples, narrative criminologist Lois Presser outlines how to determine what or who is excluded from textual materials. With strategies that can be added to the tool kits of social researchers and acti…
Sociology (21 works) · Criminology (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control (11 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (11 works) · Narrative (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works)