The Security Field: Forming and Expanding a Bourdieusian Criminology

Recent scholarly contributions have sought to integrate Bourdieusian sociology with criminology, centring for example, on the ‘street’ field as a symbolic and narrative space occupied by players within criminal justice. This article complements this broad objective by focusing on the changes in contemporary police and security governance that are pointing towards an emerging security field. Such a change can be read from the literature on plural policing and crime control, and involves the morphology of policing into nodes or assemblages of security producers. While there has been some attention to the formation of security networks, further empirical work is required to map the field dynamics using a Bourdieusian toolkit. This article explores the concept of the security field, presents some observations from current field research, and identifies some remaining questions and challenges for further conceptualisation and empirical research

Conversation as Academic Practice: Tutors\u27 Strategies in Integrating Student Learning in a Professional Training Degree Programme

Tutors are generally considered to be an additional resource in teaching and learning, as a means of augmenting that of the lecturer. This article explores tutors as academic staff with responsibilities for developing practice competencies and integrating student learning in a social care professional training degree programme. The research is small-scale, based upon data from a purposive sample of five interviews; and upon insider-participant observation notes and reflections in one single setting. The author deployed a situated ethnographic methodology alongside a frame analytic approach. The research found that in their academic practice, tutors reveal how their student contact is oriented to developing a reflective practitioner and they discuss how programme inputs impact on the student’s professional self. Simultaneously, tutors seek to create cross programme integration through finding overlaps with academic programme strands

Portfolio

Practice based assessment using concepts and theories. Students write about 4 different elements in 2,000 words

Community Safety, Social Cohesion and Embedded Autonomy: a Case from South-West Dublin

The article provides a case of community safety based upon an evaluative study of an community safety intervention in the south-west Dublin suburb of Tallaght. Characteristic of the Irish context for crime prevention and community safety has been the ad hoc nature of policy formation and the underdeveloped structures for urban security. The case is based primarily upon qualitative data from interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders, together with some additional observations from a household survey. The key themes centre on the way safety manifests from issues related to social integration in the pilot communities; the impact, capacity and potential of the local authority as an agent for urban security; the creative tension between evidence-based approaches and practical problem-solving; and the role of community safety workers’ local knowledge and autonomous action within the local authority structures

Evaluation of the Community Safety Initiative: Assignment of RAPID Co-ordinators

The Revitalising Areas by Planning, Investment and Development Programme (RAPID) was a local development initiative to counter disadvantage in local communities and was co-ordinated by local authorities. In 2011, the Childhood Development Initiative (CDI) entered a partnership with South Dublin County Council (SDCC) to assign some of the RAPID staff to implement the Community Safety Initiative (the Initiative). The assignment of RAPID Co-ordinators (RCs) added a key strategic dimension to the work of CDI.The Community Safety Initiative has had two phases: from 2009 to 2011 which was evaluated by a research team from the National University of Ireland, Galway (Kearns, et al, 2013); and the second involved the assignment of the RCs to implement the Initiative in two pilot sites in Tallaght West from May 2011 to June 2012. The current report is concerned with the second of these two phases. The key goal of CDI in this phase was to mainstream the Initiative with a statutory partner. In this context the Initiative was founded upon a memorandum of understanding between CDI and the South Dublin County Council (SDCC).The evaluation is primarily concerned with this mainstreaming process and to identify the lessons learned in policy and practice terms. Dr Matt Bowden, Lecturer in Sociology at Dublin Institute of Technology and researcher at the Centre for Social and Educational Research was commissioned to conduct the evaluation

Rejoinder to Rural Transformations and Rural Crime Book Review published in Rural Society (Vol. 32, Iss. 3)

In his review, John Scott makes two key but misleading charges: first is an intimation that rural criminology is dominated by a clique of scholars; and second that the book by and large lacks ‘critical’ analysis to his liking. The reviewer provides a glimpse of a broad analysis of the field and adopts an independently minded position. Indeed, some observations and claims are made that should rightly be part of a wider debate in criminology broadly, about its relevance, impact and contribution to the social sciences: legitimate and important questions that ought to be addressed. However, a few errors in the review need to be corrected and cannot go unchallenged. We lay out here then, instead, our concerns with this review and our reasoning as to why the permanent version of record needs to be corrected