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THE STATE OF CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN CRIMINOLOGY AND SOCIO-LEGAL STUDIES IN CANADA
 
Joane Martel and Bryan Hogeveen
Department of Sociology, University of Alberta
 
Andrew Woolford
Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba
 
This paper situates Canadian critical criminology within the ethos of neo-liberalism and in relation to early twenty-first-century scholarship. Toward this end, we attempt to establish what is critical about ‘critical’ criminology. We argue that it extends critique beyond current ontological limits without laying down foundational content that would (re)stitch new fabric onto the old. We acknowledge that ‘critical’ scholarship is becoming increasingly restrained by an almost all-encompassing neo-liberal ethos. Scholars working under the critical rubric are finding sources of data defensively guarded, and publishing and funding opportunities increasingly difficult to locate. As a result, several iconic critical scholars have migrated away from ‘criminology’. However, despite a certain malaise and pessimism surrounding critical criminology, we hope that this article (and the accompanying volume) will inspire new ‘critical’ horizons in criminology.
 

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PIONEERING CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY IN CANADA
 
R.S. Ratner
Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia
 
In this essay I present an unabashed account of my efforts to launch a critical criminology in Anglo-Canada. Accomplishing this feat required that I, and others, build an institutional base and scholarly network that would debunk the ‘liberal’ version of criminology that dominated interpretations of crime and social control at the time. I describe some of the challenges marking the formation of the ‘critical’ perspective in Canada and trace the broad developments leading to its current problems and possibilities. Though wry and anecdotal, this account seeks to identify the interplay of professional motivations and structural constraints that have continually subverted the promise of critical criminology and still threaten to drain its vital force or plunge it back into the close-knit but inconsequential marginality of early days.
 

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“SO WHAT DOES ALL OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH CRIMINOLOGY?”: SURVIVING THE RESTRUCTURING OF THE DISCIPLINE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
 
Dorothy E. Chunn
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University
 
Robert Menzies
Department of Humanities and Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University

This commentary reflects back on an article that we published in the 1999 volume of this journal, in which we offered a number of observations about the condition of Canadian academic criminology at the turn of the new century. In this brief update, we consider some of the trends that have unfolded over the intervening six years, which have contributed to the continuing polarization of the discipline and the resurgence of traditional paradigms of state crime control and order maintenance (albeit under the purportedly new banners of risk management, computational criminology, administrative criminology, crime mapping, and the like). While innovative, progressive and counter-hegemonic work continues to flourish in many quarters, the reward structures of twenty-first-century corporate university systems and criminological research environments militate overwhelmingly, and increasingly, in favour of the (re)ascendant “new orthodoxy.”
 

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CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY AND POSSIBILITY IN THE NEO-LIBERAL ETHOS
 
Bryan Hogeveen
Department of Sociology, University of Alberta
 
Andrew Woolford
Department of Sociology, University to Manitoba

This article calls for a criminology of possibility. It highlights the epistemological and ontological conditions of contemporary criminological practice, which, we suggest, has bifurcated academic praxis into ‘administrative complicity’ and ‘self inflicted irrelevance’. We argue for an art of critique which destabilizes seemingly well-anchored social relations. This critical reflexivity does not pander to established ontology or rely upon foundational judgments. We encourage critical criminologists not to multiply judgments about existing policy, programmes, institutions or societal structures, but to summon logics of being from beyond well-established limits.
 

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GOVERNING ON THE MARGINS: EXPLORING THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF GOVERNMENTALITY STUTIES TO CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY IN CANADA
 
James W. Williams
Division of Social Science, York University
 
Randy Lippert
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor
 
Despite the halcyon days of the 1970s, critical criminology’s influence in Canada has diminished in recent years. This paper examines this decline and charts one possible avenue for renewal. It argues that critical criminology has been limited by its emphasis on the state, and state-centred constructions of criminality, and by its failure to come to terms with how social injustices are reproduced through private institutions and modes of expertise constituted on the margins of the state and in the shadow of the law. Based on this critique, it is proposed that a dialogue with governmentality studies may help to overcome these limits, a dialogue that is examined in two substantive contexts: the governance of immigration and the policing of financial disorder. Revealed are not only forms of governance and oppression enacted on law’s margins, but also possibilities for the realization of the progressive politics that lies at the heart of the critical criminological enterprise.
 

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GOVERNMENTALITY, CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY, AND THE ABSENT NORM
 
Willem de Lint
University of Windsor
 
Since the late 1980s, emerging Canadian criminologists have turned in great numbers to Foucault for a common theoretical, not to mention substantive, base. However, this has not fared equally well on all levels of criminological engagement. Toward an analysis of the relationship between critical criminology and “governmentality,” this article proceeds with a brief examination of the constituents of disciplinary integrity. This is followed by commentary on relations of power and subordination. Drawing on Fraser’s (1989) critique of Foucault, the author argues that while governmentality slices criminal justice policy and practice to expose hidden continuities and breaks, the sharpness of the cut depends upon normative assumptions that remain contradictory or ungrounded, and this stands in the way of praxis.
 

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RE-IMAGINING A FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY
 
Gillian Balfour
Department of Sociology, Trent University
 
Women are the fastest-growing prisoner population in Canada. This can be attributed to, in part, the neo-liberal criminalization of poverty through its war on drugs, creation of welfare fraud, and cutbacks to social services, all of which have directly and uniquely affected women. But what of feminist criminology amidst this incarceration spiral? In this article I examine the drift of critical feminist criminology towards a Foucauldian construction of power that, in decentring the state, has theorized women’s docile bodies as governed at a distance through various technologies and rationalities of discipline and risk. I argue that it is time to re-imagine a feminist criminology that questions this shift, and asks, in theoretical and political terms, “What is to be done?”
 

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HUSBAND ABUSE: EQUALITY WITH A VENGEANCE?
 
Joanne C. Minaker
Grant MacEwan College
 
Laureen Snider
Department of Sociology, Queen’s University
 
The original problem of “wife abuse,” which feminists constituted in the 1970s, has morphed into “domestic violence” and then into “husband abuse.” We present a case study of the newly discovered problem of “husband abuse,” which we argue exemplifies the complexities of neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and feminist engagement with the criminal justice state. We argue that the myth that men are battered as often as women, an argument that challenges decades of feminist research, theory and activism, is constitutive of a backlash against women’s safety and feminist “victories.” We caution that such claims must be read as more than anti-feminist backlash, but are increasingly becoming the new “common sense,” the dominant lens used by policy-makers, media and influential interest groups. We demonstrate how the very successes of feminism, combined with neo-liberal governance, the burgeoning power of men’s movements and new communication media, have given rise to new subjects, mentalities and practices. As the claim that male and female partners are equally prone to violence resonates with discourses of equality and reinforces constituencies promoting criminal justice “solutions” to all social problems the result is equality with a vengeance.
 

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LES FEMMES ET L’ISOLEMENT CELLULAIRE AU CANADA: UN DÉFI DE L’ESPRIT SUR LA MATIÈRE?
 
Joane Martel
Département de sociologie, Université de l’Alberta
 
Prisons exhibit many of the characteristics of modernity, in which time and space are central preoccupations. This paper discusses findings of a recent study on the segregation (solitary confinement) of incarcerated women in Canada. Specifically, it examines the notions of time and space as they are practiced by the prison and experienced by women. It argues that operators of time normally used inside the prison (meals, visits, head counts, recreation time, etc.) are de-structured when a prisoner enters segregation cells where she will face a discipline of the temporal minuscule that tends to blur culturally relevant temporal benchmarks that are necessary for the prisoner’s reintegration into society. It also argues that prison segregation is a form of spatial confinement that particularly exacerbates the sacredness of personal objects and of housing, which, in turn, impinges on the maintenance of one’s habitus as well as of a space necessary for identity formation.
 

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CORONERS’ INTERESTED ADVOCACY: UNDERSTANDING WRONGFUL ACCUSATIONS AND CONVICTIONS
 
Kirsten Kramar
Department of Sociology, University of Winnipeg
 
The problems of forensic pathologists' court testimony leading to wrongful convictions in cases of infant death, especially where mothers are charged with the offence, and of this testimony possibly involving gross distortion of scientific findings arise, in part, through a systematic misunderstanding by the law, and by judges and jurors, of forensic pathologists', and especially coroners', attitude toward their professional obligations. The law takes forensic pathological and coronial testimony to be 'disinterested' scientific fact advanced purely for its inherent value in assisting the truth-seeking element of the trial process, and thus highly reliable as the basis of the exercise of the most coercive powers of government. Those delivering the testimony understand their task as part of a broader, long-tanding public health and safety mandate to "speak for the dead to protect the living." This clash of discursive frameworks has undermined the adversarial element of these trials, not just on a contingent case-by-case basis, but over the courses of extended campaigns against child abuse and of professional forensic pathological careers.
 

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HATED IDENTITIES: QUEERS AND CANADIAN ANTI-HATE LEGISLATION
 
Dawn Moore
Carleton University
 
Angus MacLean Rennie
McGill University
 
Drawing on queer theory and post-structuralism, this article explores two ‘gay bashings’, the murders of Alain Brosseau and Aaron Webster. In both cases, we argue that the application of anti-hate crime legislation reveals the troubling nature of attempts to legally fix sexual identities. The law imagines gayness to be innate and obvious. These cases show that sexual identity is fluid and contingent. Our study also shows that, through the application of hate-crime law, sexual identification is not necessarily self-determined. Politicized communities, legal actors, assailants and media all participate in naming someone’s ‘gayness’.
 
 

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