Breaking Sixty Years of Silence

Adopting an informal, autoethnographic approach, two British academics with working-class heritage reflect in this essay upon their repeated attempts to challenge criminology’s intellectual conventions and dominant ideological and institutional systems. They highlight the relatively subtle but highly effective forms of marginalization that operate in social scientific fields that often appear dedicated to inclusivity and openness. While the dominant image of criminology is of a discipline committed to intellectual and empirical innovation and the incremental advancement of knowledge on the broad fields of crime, harm and justice, in fact those working in the discipline are subject to a rigorously policed regime of permissions and prohibitions that serve to enforce conventionality, delay progress and stifle genuine creativity

Criticism · Field (mathematics) · Harm · Ideology · Silence · Subject (documents) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Sociology and Norbert Elias