Possibilities for a Post-methodological Criminology

• In Event: Cultural Criminology: Trajectories

Abstract

The notion of ‘methodology’ as a separate, systematic set of investigative procedures is in many ways a residue of an antiquated social scientific positivism. In this regard a post-methodological criminology can usefully be imagined – one that replaces methodological reification with more supple and humane forms of engagement between researchers and those people and situations they study. This sort of decentered, post-methodological approach productively reorients criminology to a late modern environment of spatial and cultural dislocation as well, and in this way follows cultural criminology’s mandate to develop a criminology that is conversant with the contemporary world. Visual criminology, narrative criminology, forms of liquid and spectral ethnography – these and other emerging approaches harbinger a criminology freed from its moribund methodological carcass, a criminology newly alive to the possibilities of epistemic uncertainty and radical human engagement.

Author

• Jeff Ferrell, University of Kent, UK