Introduction

Author(s):  
Gabrielle Watson

Respect is a value whose importance in contemporary criminal justice many would endorse in principle. It is well established that every person, by virtue of his humanity, has a claim to respect that need not be negotiated and cannot be forfeited. Rich and ongoing debates about respect beyond criminal justice—notably, in philosophy and elsewhere in the social sciences—indicate that scholarly interest in respect surpasses disciplinary boundaries, that it is of considerable explanatory and normative scope, and that it matters. It is curious, then, that despite academic interest in the democratic design of penal institutions in recent decades, respect is more akin to a slogan than a foundational value of criminal justice practice.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Fontaine

ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Howe

AbstractThis article by Adrian Howe is based on a presentation given at the ‘Sources and Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice Conference’ in November 2015, jointly sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Education and the Socio-Legal Studies Association. She begins by querying whether there are indeed distinct feminist methods in the social sciences. She outlines the impact of what she calls the ‘methodical revolution’ on the criminology discipline, Foucault's contribution and Foucauldian methodologies deployed in criminological and criminal justice research.


2018 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 228-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland G. Fryer

Police use of force, particularly lethal force, is one of the most divisive issues of the twenty-first century. To understand the nexus of race, criminal justice, and police brutality, academics and journalists have begun to amass impressive datasets on officer-involved-shootings (OIS). I compare the data and methods of three investigative journalism articles and two publications in the social sciences on a set of five rubrics and conclude that the stark differences between their findings are due to differences in what qualifies for a valid research design and not underlying differences in the datasets.


Author(s):  
Gabrielle Watson

The principal aim of the chapter is to examine the merits of respect as a concept of critical enquiry. This is an ambitious task, not least because it involves a challenge to the definitional self-evidence of respect to which criminal justice scholars and practitioners routinely subscribe. The chapter pursues three distinct lines of enquiry and reflection. What is respect? The first task is to attend to this deceptively simple question. In so doing, the chapter assembles materials on respect from philosophy and elsewhere in the social sciences. Second, having explored what respect means in general terms—though this is hotly contested—the chapter sketches and filters the most prominent classic and contemporary works into an understanding of respect for criminal justice. By initiating a dialogue with related disciplines in this way, the aim is to build a strong conceptual platform from which to engage with the substantive material on policing and imprisonment in subsequent chapters. Third, the chapter situates respect in criminal justice in contextual and methodological terms. Much of this work must be justificatory both of respect and of my own methodological choices. Having explained in some detail what respect means and why it has been selected for examination, the chapter considers why policing and imprisonment have been selected as contexts for that examination, and how an interpretive approach offers a means by which to conduct that examination.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-318
Author(s):  
Joseph Anthony Narciso Tiangco

AbstractCritical reflection on the study of psychology situates both students and practitioners in a position to ponder upon not only the conceptual, methodological, and perhaps, theoretical advances within the discipline, but more so, in rediscovering what psychology is in the first place. The first part of this paper provides a discussion on how psychology can be remembered and studied within the backdrop of a condensed history of intellectual progression. Within this context, intellectual schisms can be understood as prompted by the value system held by members of a scientific community. Such a value system, therefore, is also attributable to the emergence of contending perspectives and systems that characterize psychology within a postmodern context. The second part of this paper argues that since psychology is the study of the self, then Eastern re flections have a place in situating Zen Buddhism as it correlates with Western postmodernism. The problem of the self in Eastern philosophy is a source of rich insight in arguing that the emptiness of the self is, in fact, due to its fluidity. Given this, I conclude in this paper that the fluidity of the self accounts for the fluidity of knowledge in psychology and the rest of the social sciences. I pose the challenge that the practice of psychology in the Philippines, as a science and profession, should take on a spiritual depth in consideration of the positive values espoused by postmodernism from an East-West comparative standpoint.


PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stathis Gourgouris

From a certain standpoint, Marjorie Perloff's lament, in her 2006 MLA Presidential Address, that literary study has been relegated to a secondary position in the research framework of our profession has merit. This standpoint, however, rests on a retrospective (if not nostalgic) comparison of today's institutional parameters with the enviable autonomy that literary study once enjoyed, a self-authorization that demarcated not merely the practice of literary study (or literary criticism) but even what we might call a literary way of thinking. This was how the institution of theory in American universities took hold, and it is elementary to recall that many other disciplines, principally in the social sciences but also in the arts, conceded to literary studies the vanguard of the methodological and epistemological reconfigurations of their own disciplinary boundaries. Anthropologists, historians, film critics, and art historians, who suddenly acceded to the position of theorist, came to regard literary studies as an inventory for whatever new terms or concepts they deemed necessary in unsettling their own disciplinary givens.


2021 ◽  
pp. 555-564
Author(s):  
Matthew T. Lee ◽  
Laura D. Kubzansky ◽  
Tyler J. VanderWeele

The chapters in this volume affirm the value not only of specialized, discipline-specific research on the nature of well-being—its antecedents, and its consequences—but also of synthesizing interdisciplinary scholarship into a coherent body of research findings, theoretical explanations, and policy recommendations regarding well-being. Each of the 20 chapters makes a contribution to more than one scholarly discipline, and many bridge the social sciences and the humanities. In some cases, a disciplinary expert engaged with the methods or findings of an outside discipline. Other chapters were co-authored by scholars in the both humanities and social sciences. Still others were written by interdisciplinary experts. Beyond the individual chapters, the volume as a whole informs the meta-conversation about how scholars might draw on their specific expertise to transcend disciplinary boundaries and contribute to the collective work of conceptualizing and measuring well-being in ways that effectively advance our understanding of and ability to improve population health. In other words, we believe bringing together work from across often siloed disciplines will provide important insight regarding how individuals and social organizations can pursue the good life and build better societies. We hope that readers will appreciate each individual chapter on its own terms while also gaining a broader awareness of how the study of well-being might benefit from more sustained interdisciplinary dialogue. Ultimately, we hope our volume will encourage further efforts at synthesis by identifying and then building on areas of emerging consensus (see, for example, ...


Criminologie ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dany Lacombe

With Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault offered the social sciences a theory of power, and conceptual tools that radically transformed law reform studies. In criminology, for example, the social constructionist tradition, by drawing on Foucault's notion of power, increasingly inscribed law reform studies in a narrative of the dispersal of social control. Attempts to reform the criminal justice system are understood in terms of the increased penetration and expansion of social control into the whole of the social body ; thus, "nothing works !" In this article, I intend to challenge this conventional wisdom on law reform and the dispersion of social control, by demonstrating that it is founded on an essential-ist notion of power that we cannot attribute to Foucault. In light of his work on sexuality, and governmentality, I will examine how Foucault's productive notion of power is better understood in terms of "mechanisms for life", strategies that both constrain — through objectifying techniques — and enable — through subjectifying techniques — agency. The implications of Foucault's productive notion of power for law reform are examined in terms of methodological considerations.


Author(s):  
Hirschl Ran

The chapter argues for an interdisciplinary approach to comparative constitutional inquiry that is methodologically and substantively preferable to doctrinal accounts. It suggests that for historical, analytical, and methodological reasons, maintaining the disciplinary divide between comparative constitutional law and other closely related disciplines that study various aspects of the same constitutional phenomena, artificially and unnecessarily limits our horizons and restricts the questions asked as well as the answers provided. Traditional disciplinary boundaries, both substantive and methodological, between comparative (public) law and the social sciences continue to impede the development of comparative constitutional studies as an ambitious, coherent, and theoretically advanced area of inquiry. By engaging in a dialogue with the social sciences, and political science in particular, comparative constitutional inquiries would go beyond the traditional realms of judicial review to consider extrajudicial factors such as judicial behaviour, the origins of constitutional change, constitutional design, and the real-life effects of constitutional jurisprudence.


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