Institutionalizing Harm in Tennessee: The Right of the People to Hunt and Fish

What discourses render harm to nonhumans a right? In this article we consider the case of Tennessee\u27s Senate Joint Resolution 30, which proposed to grant citizens the personal right to hunt and fish. To clarify the institutional logics legitimizing such harm, we analyzed the text of the Resolution as well as statements by politicians and others leading up to the passage of the amendment the Resolution would enact. Logics that supported the Resolution were: (1) claims of the economic utility of hunting and fishing; (2) veneration of the past; and (3) claims of future infringement on said activities. Nonhuman targets of harm go unmentioned in these legitimizing discourses

Constructing Victimhood: Storied Opposition to Legislation Protecting LGBTQ Students

Contemporary initiatives against anti-LGBTQ bullying in the United States include enumeration policies, which name sexual orientation as an unacceptable basis for bullying. Conservative opposition to these and other initiatives has been swift, taking discursive and specifically narrative form. This article examines how opponents of prevention and intervention use narrative to resist efforts to curb anti-LGBTQ bullying, based on analysis of 22 public statements challenging anti-bullying legislation. They deny anti-LGBTQ bullying’s impact and reassign victimizer and victim positions. Achieving justice for anti-LGBTQ bullying victims requires recognition of the stories that uphold heteronormative power

The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology

Narrative criminology is an approach to studying crime and other harm that puts stories first. It investigates how such stories are composed, when and why they are told and what their effects are. This edited collection explores the methodological challenges of analysing offenders' stories, but pushes the boundaries of the field to consider the narratives of victims, bystanders and criminal justice professionals. This Handbook reflects the diversity of methodological approaches employed in narrative criminology. Chapters discuss the practicalities of listening to and observing narratives through ethnographic and observational research, and offer accessible guides to using diverse methodological approaches for listening to and interpreting narrative data. With contributions from established and emerging scholars from all over the world, and from diverse fields including politics, psychology, sociology and criminology, the Handbook reflects the cutting edge of narrative methodologies for understanding crime, control and victimisation and is an essential resource for academics studying and teaching on narrative criminology

Violent Offenders, Moral Selves: Constructing Identities and Accounts in the Research Interview

This article considers the research interview as a site for the construction of identities. In recent decades, identity has been conceptualized as something forged through the telling of life stories. To the extent that storytelling is a situated process, self-identification is as well. Using data from qualitative interviews with men who perpetrated violent crimes, I describe the narrated identities of these men, and clarify ways in which the men assimilated the research interview into their narrated identities. First, the fact and the nature of the interview were used to signify something about the moral self. Second, many of the research participants solicited and/or inferred my evaluation of them. The evaluation provided an outside opinion that was invoked or rejected to make self-claims. Third, the moral self and struggle were enacted during the interview. The men used the interview to exclude themselves from a problematic social group, “violent offenders.” The research encounter was a venue for doing social problems work and social problems resistance

I\u27ll Come Back and Stalk You

In this article, I analyze conflicts between advocacy and research on offenders and specifically male offenders. The analysis is based on the contradictory investments I had as a female researcher and an advocate during Kevin\u27s final months on death row until his execution. My activism on Kevin\u27s behalf facilitated research access. The interviews provided Kevin with a rare forum for enacting a powerful masculine self, a demonstration that eventually positioned me as his victim. The assuredness of Kevin\u27s execution allowed me to ignore his harassment and to continue data collection. As criminologists, we are likely to be consumers of state control. Criminologists, and specifically women, may also be objects of informants\u27 control. Presented in their structural context, research interactions can illuminate both the far reach of state power and the gendered nature of criminology

The Narratives of Offenders

Although criminologists have long used the offender\u27s own story to shed light on crime and its possible causes, they have not plumbed its potential as an explanatory variable. This article considers the way narrative has been conceptualized in criminology and the way that it might be re-conceptualized, following scholarship in other social sciences and in humanities, as a key instigator of action. The concept of narrative is useful for the projects of contemporary criminology because it: (1) applies to both individuals and aggregates; (2) applies to both direct perpetrators and bystanders; (3) anchors the notion of (sub)culture; (4) circumvents the realism to which other theories of criminal behavior are bound; and (5) can be readily collected by researchers, though not without confronting the problematic that is the socially situated production of discourse

Remorse and Neutralization among Violent Male Offenders

Expression of remorse by an offender to his or her victim represents healing in the aftermath of a crime. Thus, it is important to consider what may influence or impede remorse. This article analyzes interviews with 27 men who committed serious violent crimes to examine their talk about victims, responsibility, and remorse. Most of the men excused or justified their crimes using cultural discourses about violence and blameworthy victims. They spoke of feeling sorry for themselves, not for their victims. Men who expressed remorse perceived their victims as morally blameless. They humanized their victims, and their victims humanized them