Afterword: The Case for Criminological Autoethnography

AuthorDr Stephen Wakeman

It is with great pleasure and a deep sense of honour that I offer you the following thoughts to close this special edition of the British Journal of Community Justice. In the spirit of autoethnography I offer them to you here in the first person, and it is pleasing to know that I have to make no apology for this - the fact that you have read this far is testament to our shared belief in the place of the self in criminological writing. In some respects, this is a daunting task; how exactly is one supposed to follow the fantastic collection of essays that precede this brief afterword? It is not an easy job, but one that I am genuinely honoured to do. My goal here is not to review or summarise the contents of the essays, but rather to see if I can offer some thoughts as to why they matter collectively to contemporary criminology and its methodological groundings.

I will not make the mistake of assuming we have gleaned the same insights from the works collected in this issue, they are far too diverse for that, and ethnography - as practiced by the scholars in this volume at least - is too complex to have any sort of fixed meaning ascribed to it. But I can be confident of one thing I hope; that this volume presented its reader with a learning experience. As I was taught it, this is what good ethnography (what real ethnography) does best - it provides an intellectual space through which the ‘telling about’ of one cultural context enables critical thinking about it, but also about other cultural spaces too. While reading here about recreational drug users, inmates of an Ecuadorian prison, bouncers and political figures, I was struck by the amount of time I spent thinking about heroin addicts in rehab, about mixed martial arts cage fighting, and about casino gambling. In fact, I lost count of the number of times where one of the tales told here guided me into thinking a bit differently about both the group in question, and another (often unrelated) one at the same time. And this right here, this is the beauty of ethnography when it is done well. When presented in the way it is in this special edition, as critical and analytic autoethnography, it permits - it encourages even - its reader to think about their research areas/interests in new and alternative ways. In this respect, the collected authors from above (and certainly the editors too!) have my eternal thanks.

But why is an afterword even needed here then? Why does it matter what I think about...

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