Deep Hanging Out: A Call for Ethnographies of National Security

• In Event: Contemporary criminological challleges & qualitative methodology

Abstract

Current wisdom holds that ethnographic fieldwork has been sidelined in criminology, overshadowed by quantitative methodologies fostered by leading criminology journal (Tewksbury et al. 2005), and neopositivist readings of crime and policing. This marginalization has produced what some scholars have described as the rise of a “disembodied” approach to criminological research (Bosworth & Kellezi 2017, Young 2016, 2011). Drawing on the first author’s ethnographic fieldwork in Canadian counter-violent extremism (CVE) and national security settings, this article interrogates the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of this shift. It critiques the dominance of risk as a construct framing high policing practices and highlights how ethnography disrupts these paradigms by centering the lived experiences and agency of security actors. By reexamining the methodological and theoretical potential of ethnography, this article advocates for its revitalization as a critical tool to bridge the gap between abstract theorization and on-the-ground realities of security. In doing so, it centers the ethical complexities of researching high policing and situates ethnography as a transformative lens for criminological theory, capable of interrogating and reimagining the field’s foundational assumptions.

Authors

• Meriem Rebbani, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

• Karine Côté-Boucher, Université de Montréal