Roundtable: Criminological Matters: Thinking Against State Violence

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract/Description

This roundtable extends a critical and growing conversation on criminology’s possibilities, complicities, and failures in responding to state violence and surveillance. In particular, we find ourselves moved to discuss, given this year’s conference theme, whether and to what extent criminology matters. Here, we take up the question of matter as pertaining to that which is material, as well as the politicization of care and concern for life. In one sense, criminological matter provides a way to account for the discipline’s material relationship – in the form of, expertise, training, and pedagogy – to the carceral state and the various forms of harm and suffering produced therein. Similarly, we will also interrogate criminology’s capacity to practice any type of ethic towards social life and the ways in which this might problematize or, at least complicate, theory, method, and knowledge. Thinking through criminological matters in this way also extends to the university itself and its most recent attempts at policing the crisis and shutting down student protests. As we will consider, what critiques, insights, and practices become available to us if we are to understand ourselves as inhabiting a discipline (or university) that does not matter in any ethical way?

Sub Unit

• Area XIV. Roundtables

Chair

• Justin Strong, San Jose State University

Discussants

• Anthony Triola, University of California, Irvine

• Amanda Petersen, Old Dominion University

• Navi Kaur, San Francisco State University

• Ernest Chavez, California State University, Long Beach