Lorana Bartels and Kelly Richards (eds), Qualitative Criminology: Stories from the field.
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865812458059 |
| Author | William R Wood |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
This comprehensive account provides a much-needed international perspective for those
working within specific country contexts. Particularly potent are the worldwide trends
that in different guises are shrouded by similar discourses of illegality and sovereignty.
What is particularly disturbing is that the deaths are predictable and hence preventable
with appropriate political will.
For a book that deals with such a hefty topic, it is written in an accessible manner that
will ensure its value not only to academics but to practitioners and activists. My hope is
that the ministers of states and government authorities that are tasked with border
protection will examine what the authors reveal, and find the heart to stand back
from politics to produce humane and life-enhancing approaches.
Linda Briskman
Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology
Lorana Bartels and Kelly Richards (eds), Qualitative Criminology: Stories from the field. Sydney: Hawkins
Press, 2011; 251, pp.: ISBN 9781876067243, $59.95 (pbk)
This edited volume is a needed addition to the relative dearth of work in qualitative
criminology regarding the problems and challenges facing researchers in the field, in
research design and implementation, in the ethics of research, in the role of the
researcher, and many other aspects of qualitative research. Unlike quantitative research
journals, which are replete with articles on method, reliability and validity, and other
challenges or problems; and qualitative research in other fields such as sociology and
anthropology that have more directly addressed both the practical and theoretical prob-
lems in qualitative research, qualitative criminology has been hesitant to do so until
recently.
This has been the case not only in Australia, but also in Britain and the United States.
While it is difficult to know, one can speculate that this lack of reflexivity as well as
reticence towards opening up of the ‘black box’ of qualitative research is related to the
degree to which criminology has been historically dependent upon other disciplines for
its knowledge claims, as well as more beholden to and aligned with dominant and
hegemonic forms of social power. Of course qualitative work in areas of crime, deviance,
and criminal justice have long spoken to some of the issues set forth in this volume – one
can think of William Foote Whyte’s (1943) self-admitted blunders in establishing rela-
tionships with people on Boston’s North End, or more recently the work of Philippe
Bourgois whose ethnographies In Search of Respect (1996) and Righteous Dopefiend
(2009, with Jeff Schonberg) demonstrate a reflexivity in research that eschews any
claim to objectivity while linking the lives and choices of people to larger social, political
and cultural determinants. The point is not that there is nothing new in this edited
collection, quite the contrary, but rather that qualitative researchers have largely
been required to piecemeal together such accounts themselves through disparate read-
ings and/or insider knowledge of research. In this regard alone, volumes such as this
one are useful and important as contributions to understanding how such knowledge
is produced, and how knowledge claims are related not only to epistemological
Book Reviews 449
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