Dear British criminology: Where has all the race and racism gone?

In this article we use Emirbayer and Desmond’s institutional reflexivity framework to critically examine the production of racial knowledge in British criminology. Identifying weakness, neglect and marginalization in theorizing race and racism, we focus principally on the disciplinary unconscious element of their three-tier framework, identifying and interrogating aspects of criminology’s ‘obligatory problematics’, ‘habits of thought’ and ‘position-taking’ as well as its institutional structure and social relations that combine to render the discipline ‘institutionally white’. We also consider, briefly, aspects of criminology’s relationship to race, racism and whiteness in the USA. The final part of the article makes the case for British criminology to engage in telling and narrating racisms, urging it to understand the complexities of race in our subject matter, avoid its reduction to class and inequality, and to pay particular attention to reflexivity, history, sociology and language, turning to face race with postcolonial tools and resolve

Ethnographic method

This chapter explores the use of a range of ethnographic methods within qualitative methodology. Alongside introducing the building blocks of ethnographic methods, with a focus on reflexivity, participant-observation, fieldwork, and visual and sensory methods, it will draw upon my experiences in studying young Chinese Australians’ lived experiences in health and physical activity. My experiences in the field provide insights into the potentials and perils of using some of these ethnographic methods and issues navigating research ethics. I emphasize the advantages of an approach that allows for innovative and unique interactions between the researcher and research participants within the participants’ real-life environments. The use of innovative ethnographic methods encourages thinking and practice beyond traditional modes of enquiry and beyond understanding the participants’ lived experiences through texts and numbers alone