September/septembre
2006 Volume 48, no. 5
Contents/Sommaire
Law, Society, and Critique in Canada /
Droit, crime et pense¤ e critique au Canada
Edited by / Sous la direction de Bryan Hogeveen,
Joane Martel, and / et Andrew Woolford
An
Opening . . .
Andrew Woolford, Bryan Hogeveen, and Joane Martel
Une ouverture . . .
Andrew Woolford, Bryan Hogeveen et Joane Martel
Articles
The State of Critical Scholarship in Criminology and
Socio-Legal Studies
in Canada
Joane Martel, Bryan Hogeveen, and Andrew Woolford
Pioneering Critical Criminology in Canada
R. S. Ratner
‘‘So what does all of this have to do with
criminology?’’: Surviving
the Restructuring of the Discipline in the Twenty-First Century
Dorothy E. Chunn and Robert Menzies
Critical Criminology and Possibility in the Neo-liberal
Ethos
Bryan Hogeveen and Andrew Woolford
Governing on the Margins: Exploring the Contributions
of Governmentality Studies to Critical Criminology in Canada
James W. Williams and Randy Lippert
Governmentality, Critical Criminology, and the Absent
Norm
Willem de Lint
Re-imagining a Feminist Criminology
Gillian Balfour
Husband Abuse: Equality with a Vengeance?
Joanne C. Minaker and Laureen Snider
Les femmes et l’isolement cellulaire au Canada: un de´fi
de l’esprit sur la matie`re
Joane Martel
Coroners’ Interested Advocacy: Understanding
Wrongful Accusations
and Convictions
Kirsten Kramar
Hated Identities: Queers and Canadian Anti-hate Legislation
Dawn Moore and Angus MacLean Rennie
Articles
The State of Critical Scholarship in Criminology
and Socio-Legal Studies
in Canada
Joane Martel, Bryan Hogeveen, and Andrew Woolford
This
article situates Canadian critical criminology within the ethos of
neo-liberalism and in relation to early-twenty-first-century scholarship.
Toward this end, we attempt to establish what is critical about ‘‘critical’’
criminology. We argue that it extends critique beyond current ontological
limits without laying down foundational content that would (re-)stitch
new
fabric onto the old. We acknowledge that ‘‘critical’’
scholarship is becoming
increasingly restrained by an almost all-encompassing neo-liberal
ethos.
Scholars working under the critical rubric are finding sources of
data
defensively guarded, and publishing and funding opportunities increasingly
difficult to locate. As a result, several iconic critical scholars
have migrated
away from ‘‘criminology.’’ However, despite a
certain malaise and
pessimism surrounding critical criminology, we hope that this article
(and the accompanying special issue) will inspire new ‘‘critical’’
horizons
in criminology.
Pioneering Critical Criminology in Canada
R. S. Ratner
In
this essay I present an unabashed account of my efforts to launch
a critical
criminology in Anglo-Canada. Accomplishing this feat required that
I, and
others, build an institutional base and scholarly network that would
debunk
the ‘‘liberal’’ version of criminology that dominated
interpretations of crime
and social control at the time. I describe some of the challenges
marking
the formation of the ‘‘critical’’ perspective
in Canada and trace the broad
developments leading to its current problems and possibilities. Though
wry
and anecdotal, this account seeks to identify the interplay of professional
motivations and structural constraints that have continually subverted
the
promise of critical criminology and still threaten to drain its vital
force
or plunge it back into the close-knit but inconsequential marginality
of
early days.
‘‘So what does all of this have to do
with criminology?’’: Surviving
the Restructuring of the Discipline in the Twenty-First Century
Dorothy E. Chunn and Robert Menzies
This
commentary reflects back on an article that we published in the 1999
volume of this journal, which offered a number of observations about
the
condition of Canadian academic criminology at the turn of the new
century.
In this brief update, we consider some of the trends that have unfolded
over
the intervening six years, which have contributed to the continuing
polarization of the discipline and the resurgence of traditional paradigms
of
state crime control and order maintenance (albeit under the purportedly
new
banners of risk management, computational criminology, administrative
criminology, crime mapping, and the like). While innovative, progressive,
and counter-hegemonic work continues to flourish in many quarters,
the reward structures of twenty-first-century corporate university
systems and criminological research environments militate
overwhelmingly, and increasingly, in favour of the (re)ascendant ‘‘new
orthodoxy.’’
Critical
Criminology and Possibility in the Neo-liberal Ethos
Bryan Hogeveen and Andrew Woolford
This article calls for a criminology of possibility. It highlights
the
epistemological and ontological conditions of contemporary criminological
practice, which, we suggest, has bifurcated academic praxis into
‘‘administrative complicity’’ and ‘‘self-inflicted
irrelevance.’’ We argue for
an art of critique that destabilizes seemingly well-anchored social
relations.
This critical reflexivity does not pander to established ontology
or rely
upon foundational judgements. We encourage critical criminologists
not
to multiply judgements about existing policy, programmes, institutions,
or societal structures but to summon logics of being from beyond
well-established limits.
Governing on the Margins: Exploring the Contributions
of Governmentality Studies to Critical Criminology in Canada
James W. Williams and Randy Lippert
Despite
the promise of the 1970s, critical criminology’s influence in
Canada
has diminished in recent years. This paper examines this decline and
charts
one possible avenue for renewal. It argues that critical criminology
has been
limited by its emphasis on the state, and state-centred constructions
of
criminality, and by its failure to come to terms with how social injustices
are
reproduced through private institutions and modes of expertise constituted
on
the margins of the state and in the shadow of the law. Based on this
critique,
it is proposed that a dialogue with governmentality studies may help
to
overcome these limits, a dialogue that is examined in two substantive
contexts: the governance of immigration and the policing of financial
disorder.
Revealed are not only forms of governance and oppression enacted on
law’s
margins, but also possibilities for the realization of the progressive
politics
that lies at the heart of the critical criminological enterprise.
Governmentality, Critical Criminology, and the
Absent Norm
Willem de Lint
Since the late 1980s, emerging Canadian criminologists have turned
in great
numbers to Foucault for a common theoretical, not to mention substantive,
base. However, this has not fared equally well on all levels of criminological
engagement. Toward an analysis of the relationship between critical
criminology and ‘‘governmentality,’’ this article
proceeds with a brief
examination of the constituents of disciplinary integrity. This is
followed by
commentary on relations of power and subordination. Drawing on Fraser’s
(1989) critique of Foucault, the author argues that while governmentality
slices criminal justice policy and practice to expose hidden continuities
and
breaks, the sharpness of the cut depends upon normative assumptions
that
remain contradictory or ungrounded, and this stands in the way of
praxis.
Re-imagining
a Feminist Criminology
Gillian Balfour
Women are the fastest-growing prisoner population in Canada. This
can be
attributed, in part, to the neo-liberal criminalization of poverty
through its
war on drugs, creation of welfare fraud, and cutbacks to social services,
all of
which have directly and uniquely affected women. But what of feminist
criminology amidst this incarceration spiral? In this article I examine
the
drift of critical feminist criminology toward a Foucauldian construction
of
power that, in decentring the state, has theorized women’s docile
bodies as
governed at a distance through various technologies and rationalities
of
discipline and risk. I argue that it is time to re-imagine a feminist
criminology
that questions this shift and asks, in theoretical and political terms,
‘‘What is
to be done?’’
Husband Abuse: Equality with a Vengeance?
Joanne C. Minaker and Laureen Snider
The
original problem of ‘‘wife abuse,’’ which feminists
constituted in the
1970s, has morphed into ‘‘domestic violence’’
and then into ‘‘husband abuse.’’
We present a case study of the newly discovered problem of ‘‘husband
abuse,’’ which we argue exemplifies the complexities of
neo-liberalism,
neo-conservatism, and feminist engagement with the criminal-justice
state.
We argue that the myth that men are battered as often as women,
an argument that challenges decades of feminist research, theory,
and
activism, is constitutive of a backlash against women’s safety
and feminist
‘‘victories.’’ We caution that such claims must
be read as more than
anti-feminist backlash but are increasingly becoming the new ‘‘common
sense,’’ the dominant lens used by policy makers, media,
and influential
interest groups. We demonstrate how the very successes of feminism,
combined with neo-liberal governance, the burgeoning power of men’s
movements, and new communication media, have given rise to new subjects,
mentalities, and practices. As the claim that male and female partners
are
equally prone to violence resonates with discourses of equality and
reinforces
constituencies promoting criminal-justice ‘‘solutions’’
to all social problems,
the result is equality with a vengeance.
Les femmes et l’isolement cellulaire au Canada:
un de´fi de l’esprit sur la matie`re
Joane Martel
Prisons exhibit many of the characteristics of modernity, in which
time and
space are central preoccupations. This article discusses findings
of a recent
study on the segregation (solitary confinement) of incarcerated women
in
Canada. Specifically, it examines the notions of time and space as
they are
practised by the prison and experienced by women. It argues that operators
of
time normally used inside the prison (meals, visits, head counts,
recreation
time, etc.) are de-structured when a prisoner enters segregation cells
where
she will face a discipline of the temporal minuscule that tends to
blur
culturally relevant temporal benchmarks that are necessary for the
prisoner’s
reintegration into society. It also argues that prison segregation
is a form of
spatial confinement that particularly exacerbates the sacredness of
personal
objects and of housing, which, in turn, impinges on the maintenance
of one’s
habitus as well as of a space necessary for identity formation.
Coroners’ Interested Advocacy: Understanding
Wrongful Accusations
and Convictions
Kirsten Kramar
The problems of forensic pathologists’ court testimony leading
to wrongful
convictions in cases of infant death, especially where mothers are
charged with
the offence, and of this testimony possibly involving gross distortion
of
scientific findings arise, in part, through a systematic misunderstanding
by
the law, and by judges and jurors, of forensic pathologists’,
and especially
coroners’, attitude toward their professional obligations. The
law takes
forensic pathological and coronial testimony to be ‘‘disinterested’’
scientific
fact advanced purely for its inherent value in assisting the truth-seeking
element of the trial process, and thus highly reliable as the basis
of the exercise
of the most coercive powers of government. Those delivering the testimony
understand their task as part of a broader, long-standing public health
and
safety mandate to ‘‘speak for the dead to protect the living.’’
This clash of
discursive frameworks has undermined the adversarial element of these
trials,
not just on a contingent case-by-case basis but over the courses of
extended
campaigns against child abuse and of professional forensic pathological
careers.
Hated Identities: Queers and Canadian Anti-hate
Legislation
Dawn Moore and Angus MacLean Rennie
Drawing on queer theory and post-structuralism, this article explores
two
‘‘gay bashings,’’ the murders of Alain Brousseau
and Aaron Webster. In both
cases, we argue that the application of anti-hate crime legislation
reveals the
troubling nature of attempts to legally fix sexual identities. The
law imagines
gayness to be innate and obvious. These cases show that sexual identity
is
fluid and contingent. Our study also shows that, through the application
of hate-crime law, sexual identification is not necessarily self-determined.
Politicized communities, legal actors, assailants, and media all participate
in naming someone’s ‘‘gayness.’’
