 |
Ultra-realist ethnographic networks
|
|
|
|
Ultra-realist ethnographic networks
Ultra-realist criminologists reject the notion that plural cultures are the bedrock of society. Following Hammersley (1998) and Fine (1999), ultra-realists argue that ethnographers can communicate with each other to construct plausible accounts of our shared reality contextualized in the underlying political economy. This approach understands that the problems of generalization and researcher bias have limited the effectiveness of the isolated ethnographies that have dominated the field up to now, and that the philosophical and theoretical frameworks the researchers have used – pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, post-structuralism, and so on – are threadbare and overly influenced by traditional political positions (see Hall and Winlow, 2015). To escape these restrictions, ultra-realists advocate contextualized reflexive realism and the establishment of ethnographic and theoretical networks within and between nations. The approach advocates the use of advanced ethnographic methods, col- laborative data and new theoretical frameworks, such as zemiology and pseudo-pacification, based on concepts adapted from advanced philosophical posi- tions such as speculative realism and transcendental materialism (see Ellis, 2016). Such data and theorization can provide the degree of generalizability necessary to connect localized meanings and practices to the broad global structures and pro- cesses of history, economy and consumer culture (see Hall et al., 2008; Horsley, 2015). For instance, Winlow et al. (2015) used ultra-realist principles to gather data and construct an alternative theoretical perspective on the riots that occurred in England, Spain and Greece after the recent economic crash and austerity pro- grammes. Seeking to throw off the romantic baggage associated with traditional ethnographies, the Deviant Leisure Group (see Smith and Raymen, 2018) consists of networked ethnographers and theorists investigating harms that are integral to current commercialized leisure pursuits in various research settings (see Briggs, 2013; Kindynis, 2017; Raymen and Smith, 2016). The aim is not to produce one ‘grand theory’, but to develop advanced collaborative research methods and new theoretical frameworks that offer more incisive explanatory power in today’s rap- idly changing world.
SUMMARY AND REVIEW
This chapter has discussed the ethnographic approach in criminological research. It has outlined the basic research methods and processes used by ethnographic researchers in the general social science field and discussed the ethnographic approach to criminological research. The chapter has shown how new contemporary ethnographic methods are advancing and how they can provide innovative ways of generating rich data in the rapidly changing world of crime, harm and control. It has also investigated the possibility of linking the generalizable data produced by ethno- graphic networks to new theoretical frameworks based on concepts drawn from contemporary philosophy.
|
|
|
I have suggested that the ethnographic approach should be very important to the general social scientific project, but currently quantitative research is dominant, which means that the finely detailed meanings and practices that constitute human life are relatively marginalized. Although the ethnographic approach to criminologi- cal research has to contend with many practical and ethical problems, the rich data it can provide offer a sound empirical platform on which convincing theoretical explanations of criminality and its modes of control can be constructed. However, to perform this task the ethnographic approach requires further funding, a more valued place in the criminological publishing industry, increased rigour and the further development of its methods and theoretical frameworks. Despite the disciplinary marginalization, some contemporary ethnographic methods are advancing at quite a pace and providing innovative ways of understanding the rapidly changing world of crime, harm and control. If these methods can be practised in growing networks to produce generalizable data that can be combined with new theoretical frameworks based on contemporary philosophical concepts and perspectives, the ethnographic approach could become the empirical mainstay of a rejuvenated twenty-first-century criminology.
 | |||
 | |||
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Karen O’Reilly’s (2009) book Key Concepts in Ethnography is an excellent introductory tour of the world of modern ethnography. To get a flavour of a modern classic ethnography, try Dick Hobbs’s (1988) Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, the Working Class and Detectives in the East End of London. Jennifer Fleetwood’s (2014) Drug Mules: Women in the International Cocaine Trade is an award-winning contemporary feminist ethnography that moves beyond the stereotype of the passive female victim. Simon Winlow’s (2001) Badfellas: Crime, Tradition and New Masculinities is a classic study in which the researcher achieved the deepest possible immersion in the field of violent crime. Tony Ellis’s (2016) Men, Masculinities and Violence: An Ethnographic Study is an award-winning contempo- rary ethnography that also achieves deep immersion and adopts a brand new philosophical framework to move forward the theorization of male violence. Alex Hall and Giorgios Antonopoulos’s (2016) book Fake Meds Online: The Internet and the Transnational Market in Illicit Pharmaceuticals offers one of the most sophisticated examples of the vir- tual ethnography. The groundbreaking ultra-realist ethnographic and theoretical work of the Deviant Leisure Group can be found at https: //deviantleisure. wordpress. com.
REFERENCES
Adler, P. (1985) Wheeling and Dealing: An Ethnography of an Upper-Level Drug-Dealing and Smuggling Community. New York: Columbia University Press.
Alasuutari, P. (1995) Researching Culture: Qualitative Method and Cultural Studies. London: Sage.
Ancrum, C. (2013) ‘Stalking the margins of legality: ethnography, participant observation and the postmodern “underworld”’, in S. Winlow and R. Atkinson (eds), New Directions in Crime and Deviancy. London: Routledge.
Anderson, E. (2001) The Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City, 2nd edition. New York: W. W. Norton.
|
|
|
Arfman, W., Mutsaers, P., Van der Aa, J. and Hoondert, M. (2016) ‘The cultural com- plexity of victimhood’, Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Paper 163. University of Tilburg.
Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., Delamont, S., Lofland, J. and Lofland, L. (2001) Handbook of Ethnography. London: Sage.
Becker, H. S. (1973) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Bourgois, P. (1995) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Briggs, D. (2013) Deviance and Risk on Holiday: An Ethnography of British Tourists in Ibiza. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Davey, Z., Schifano, F., Corazza, O. and Deluca, P. (2012) ‘e-Psychonauts: conduct- ing research in online drug forum communities’, Journal of Mental Health, 21: 386–94.
Dews, B. and Law, C. (eds) (1995) This Fine Place so Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Duneier, M. (1994) Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability and Masculinity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ellis, A. (2016) Men, Masculinities and Violence: An Ethnographic Study. London: Routledge.
Fielding, N. (1981) The National Front. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fine, G. A. (1999) ‘Field labour and ethnographic reality’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28(5): 532–9.
Fleetwood, J. (2014) Drug Mules Women in the International Cocaine Trade. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gilmore, D. D. (1990) Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Gouldner, A. (1971) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London: Heinemann. Guillemin, M. and Gillam, L. (2004) ‘Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important moments”
in research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 10(2): 261–80.
Hall, A. and Antonopoulos, G. (2016) Fake Meds Online: The Internet and the Transnational Market in Illicit Pharmaceuticals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2007) ‘Cultural criminology and primitive accumulation: a formal introduction for two strangers who should really become more intimate’, Crime, Media, Culture, 3(1): 82–90.
Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra- Realism. London: Routledge.
Hall, S., Winlow, S. and Ancrum, A. (2008) Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism. London: Routledge/Willan.
Hallsworth, S. (2013) The Gang and Beyond: Interpreting Violent Street Worlds. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Hammersley, M. (1998) Reading Ethnographic Research, 2nd edition. London: Longman. Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (1995) Ethnography: Principles in Practice, 2nd edition.
London: Routledge.
Herrera, C. D. (2003) ‘A clash of methodology and ethics in “undercover” social science’,
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 33: 351–62.
Ho, K. (2009) Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hobbs, D. (1988) Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, the Working Class and Detectives in the East End of London. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Holdaway, S. (1984) Inside the British Police: A Force at Work. Chichester: Wiley/Blackwell. Horsley, M. (2015) The Dark Side of Prosperity: Late Capitalism’s Culture of Indebtedness.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Israel, M. (2014) Research Ethics and Integrity for Social Scientists. London: Sage. Jacques, S. (2014) ‘The quantitative–qualitative divide in criminology: a theory of ideas’
importance, attractiveness, and publication’, Theoretical Criminology, 18(3): 317–34. Katz, J. (1988) The Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New
York: Basic Books.
Keen, S. (2011) Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? London: Zed Books.
|
|
|
Kindynis, T. (2017) ‘Urban exploration: from subterranean to spectacle’, British Journal of Criminology, 57(4): 982–1001.
Lé vi-Strauss, C. (1973) Tristes Tropiques (trans. J. Weightman and D. Weightman). New York: Atheneum.
Luyendijk, J. (2015) Swimming with Sharks: My Journey into the World of Bankers. London: Guardian/Faber.
McLintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Sexuality and Gender in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge.
Mason, J. (2002) Qualitative Researching, 2nd edition. London: Sage. Matthews, R. (2014) Realist Criminology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Murphy, E. and Dingwall, R. (2001) ‘The ethics of ethnography’, in P. Atkinson, A. Coffey,
S. Delamont, J. Lofland and L. Lofland (eds), Handbook of Ethnography. London: Sage. Nordstrom, C. (2007) Global Outlaws: Crime, Power and Money in the Contemporary
World. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
O’Reilly, K. (2009) Key Concepts in Ethnography. London: Sage.
Park, R. E., Burgess, E. W. and McKenzie, R. D. (1925) The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pink, S. (2007) Doing Visual Ethnography, 2nd edition. London: Sage.
Raymen, T. and Smith, O. (2016) ‘What’s deviance got to do with it? Black Friday sales, violence, and hyper-conformity’, British Journal of Criminology, 56(2): 389–405.
Reckless, W. C. (1933) Vice in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sandberg, S. and Copes, C. (2012) ‘Speaking with ethnographers: the challenges of researching drug dealers and offenders’, Journal of Drug Issues, 43(2): 176–97.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1993) Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Smith, O. (2014) Contemporary Adulthood and the Night Time Economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, O. and Raymen, T. (2018) ‘Deviant leisure: a criminological perspective’, Theoretical Criminology, 22(1): 63–82.
Street, A. F. (1992) Inside Nursing: A Critical Ethnography of Clinical Nursing Practice. New York: State University of New York Press.
Sutherland, E. (1939) Principles of Criminology, 3rd edition. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (1973) The New Criminology. London: Routledge.
Tewksbury, R., Dabney, D. D. and Copes, H. (2010) ‘The prominence of qualitative research in criminology and criminal justice scholarship’, Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 21: 391–411.
Tewksbury, R., DeMichele, M. T. and Miller, J. M. (2005) ‘Methodological orientation of arti- cles appearing in criminal justice’s top journals: who publishes what and where? ’, Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 16: 265–79.
Thrasher, F. M. (1927) The Gang: A Study of 1, 313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Treadwell, J., Briggs, D., Winlow, S. and Hall, S. (2013) ‘Shopocalypse Now: consumer culture and the English riots of 2011’, British Journal of Criminology, 53(1): 1–17.
Wakeman, S. (2014) ‘Fieldwork, biography and emotion: doing criminological autoethnog- raphy’, British Journal of Criminology, 54(5): 705–21.
Wakeman, S. (2016) ‘The moral economy of heroin in “austerity Britain”’, Critical Criminology, 24(3): 363–77.
Weaver, W. (1948) ‘Science and complexity’, American Scientist, 36: 536–44.
Webber, C. and Yip, M. (2013) ‘Drifting on and off-line: humanising the cybercriminal’, in
S. Winlow and R. Atkinson (eds), New Directions in Crime and Deviancy. London: Routledge, pp. 191–205.
Whyte, W. F. (1943) Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
|
|
|
Williams, M. (2000) ‘Interpretivism and generalization’, Sociology, 34(2): 209–24.
Willis, P. (1981) Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.
Winlow, S. (2001) Badfellas: Crime, Tradition and New Masculinities. Oxford: Berg.
Winlow, S. (2014) ‘Trauma, guilt and the unconscious: some theoretical notes on violent subjectivity’, in J. Kilby and L. Ray (eds), Violence and Society: Toward a New Sociology. Chichester: Wiley/Blackwell, pp. 13–31.
Winlow, S. and Hall, S. (2012) ‘What is an ethics committee? Academic governance in an era of belief and incredulity’, British Journal of Criminology, 52(2): 400–16.
Winlow, S., Hall, S., Treadwell, J. and Briggs, D. (2015) Riots and Political Protest: Notes from the Post-Political Present. London: Routledge.
Wirth, L. (1928) The Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Yates, J. (2004) ‘Criminological ethnography: risks, dilemmas and their negotiation’, in
G. Mesko, M. Pagon and B. Dobovsek (eds), Policing in Central and Eastern Europe: Dilemmas of Contemporary Criminal Justice. Maribor: Faculty of Criminal Justice, University of Maribor.
Young, J. (2004) ‘Voodoo criminology and the numbers game’, in J. Ferrell, K. Hayward,
W. Morrison and M. Presdee (eds), Cultural Criminology Unleashed. London: The Glasshouse Press.
|
|
|
