Editorial: Entering the Field of Criminological Research
Author | Dr Jaime Waters |
“We are - before we are academics, scholars or researchers - diverse human beings with a vast array of life experiences and complex histories. The emotive processes that stem from these and the theoretical insights they can provide should not be underestimated. My point here is that the ‘self’ is not just who we are, but a living embodiment of how we research, how we theorize and how we come [to] know and tell about our subjects. In this respect, no longer should it be relegated to footnotes or methodological appendices.” (Wakeman 2014: 719).
This special issue of the British Journal of Community Justice will focus upon the experiences of researchers making their entry into the field of criminological research. Its genesis can be traced to the annual meetings of the European Society of Criminology Postgraduate and Early Stage Researcher Working Group. During these meetings the group’s conversations repeatedly turned to the nagging feeling that the lived reality of criminological investigation did not always match up with what we had been taught in classes or read in textbooks prior to beginning our nascent research careers.
Professor Yvonne Jewkes’ keynote speech at the 2013 British Society of Criminology conference at the University of Wolverhampton, which highlighted some of the difficulties of engaging in criminological research, inspired us to bring together a special panel at the 2014 European Society of Criminology Conference in Prague on ‘entering the field of criminological research’. At this panel a group of emerging scholars picked up on the themes Professor Jewkes had discussed in Wolverhampton and sought to show the special difficulties faced by those more inexperienced researchers starting out on their journey into the discipline. At this panel Dr Jaime Waters discussed how personal biography had influenced her research, Dr Sabine Carl talked of the difficulties involved in interviewing professionals and experts, Bethany Schmidt spoke of values, allegiances, and politics in prisons research, and Filip Vojta presented on issues in qualitative research on international criminal justice, all from the perspective of those undergoing their initiation into the world of scholarly inquiry. The panel was very well received, and two of the papers presented on that day (Waters and Carl) have been developed for inclusion in this issue.
This special issue, building on the success of the Prague panel, seeks to document the experiences of early career researchers and to provide an account of the ‘messiness’ of the research process that, all too often, inexperienced researchers are ill prepared for. Across the four original contributions, a foreword by Yvonne Jewkes and an afterword by Stephen Wakeman, a number of key themes have emerged. For example, the papers raise the question of the place of emotion in research and the way in which emotions can potentially be useful in scholarly investigation. In her keynote speech in Wolverhampton, Jewkes’ specific focus was on the emotional investment often...
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