This article contributes to recent discussions around intersectionality, a framework that captures how two or more axes of subordination overlap in practice, and its utility for criminology. Even though intersectionality offers an analytic through which to account for discursive dimensions of marginalization, feminist criticisms of intersectionality's proliferation across disciplines suggests that the concept needs to be revisited. After contextualizing intersectionality's tenets, we trace how feminists have addressed related issues through a transnational lens and then consider how these adaptations can help inform future criminological inquiry. We conclude with the argument that a critical re-reading of intersectionality not only enables a focused critique of mainstream criminology, but also encourages an innovative feminist praxis within the discipline.
Macro-level theories of punishment suggest that particular social conditions explain national imprisonment rates over place and time. Important causal factors underlying these theories include a country’s level of development, criminality, socioeconomic inequality, and political volatility. Based on a sample of 166 nations and set-theoretical methods, the present study uses the formal logic standards of necessity and sufficiency to evaluate the empirical merits of these widely assumed causal relations. After summarizing the confirmatory evidence and patterns of exceptional cases, results are discussed in terms of their implications for refining current macro-level theories of punishment and future testing of them through the conjunctive analysis of set-theoretic relations.
This paper presents the research methodology of an exploratory study interviewing human traffickers. Utilizing open-ended, semi-structured qualitative interviews with traffickers, exploratory research was conducted in 2003. With an overall goal of understanding the human trafficking phenomenon from the standpoint of those individuals who support, reproduce, and actively work to sustain it, our research questions focused on how traffickers make sense of their position within the illegal market of sex trafficking. Other thematic questions included characteristics and personal dimensions of the traffickers, reasons they entered the business, their perceptions of the business, and their opinions of those they traffic. For the purpose of this paper, we will address the difficulty and simplicity of conducting interviews with human traffickers. Information about the research project in general, methods used, ethical considerations, and thematic scope will also be addressed with a final discussion section highlighting advantages and disadvantages of methods used.
There is a growing body of academic literature that scrutinises the effects of technologies deployed to surveil the physical bodies of citizens. This paper considers the role of affect; that is, the visceral and emotive forces underpinning conscious forms of knowing that can drive one's thoughts, feelings and movements. Drawing from research on two distinctly different groups of surveilled subjects -paroled sex offenders and elite athletes -it examines the effects of biosurveillance in their lives and how their reflections reveal unique insight into how subjectivity, citizenship, harm and deviance become constructed in intimate and public ways vis-à-vis technologies of bodily regulation. Specifically, we argue, their narratives reveal cultural conditions of biosurveillance, particularly how risk becomes embodied and internalised in subjective ways.
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