Social justice and problematizing the concept of “rural”

• In Event: Roundtable: Rural Crime Prevention: Theory, Tactics and Techniques

Abstract

Even though rural criminology is today a full-fledged subfield within criminology, there remains the necessity of establishing a definition of rural that is simultaneously correct and generalisable across the rural regions of the world today. One objective of this paper is to examine and discuss the ways rural and gemeinschaft were used both productively and counter-productively in past criminological scholarship. A second objective is to argue that a nominalist definition of rural based on population size and/or density is the only way to avoid various conceptual issues and to provide a framework that allows for both case study and cross-comparative research within and between various regions of the world. By necessity, therefore, a nominalist definition decouples the rural/gemeinschaft conflation completely. Even so, a size/density approach is not without definitional problems, but does have the advantage of disposing of most of the negative conceptual baggage of the past. The paper discusses the implications of problematizing rural within considerations of issues associated with social justice and policing.

Author

• Joseph Donnermeyer, The Ohio State University