Disciplinary boundaries and identities have been both frustrating and generative, tactical and alienating, in my own efforts to make sense of the work I do and of the collective work we do. At various moments, I move between all sorts of labels. The role of criminologist, of course, is so historically and foundationally compromised in its collusion with state violence that it marks an especially fraught space to inhabit professionally. Most days, in the classroom and my research, I am pushing back against it…or, minimally, seeking to reinvent it. I find more exciting the proliferation of scholarly names that will allow me as a thinker to speak to the urgency of our penal projects and the transformative possibilities of our political moment - and to do so across disciplines: in the current moment, the term “critical carceral scholar” spans the most boundaries - social science and humanities - in my opinion, with the clearest public and activist commitments.
But as someone housed in a sociology department, I never get far from disciplinary force fields. I move daily between meetings where one minute I’m relying upon the capital, commitments, and status of Sociology to pursue social justice aims in College-level settings and then back at my departmental faculty meeting, I’m shifting gears to translate/defend the importance of our (very hard to name but critical) work as a small concentration of criminologists against the paradigmatic force of one of the founding disciplines. And, of course, we are all doing this against the rise of the neoliberal university that is not only exhausting in its mantra of assessment, scarcity, and dispossession but rife with the performing, circumventing and corralling of collective thinking about social problems. Later, seated on airplanes to conferences, in discussions with local police, and at school PTA meetings, I’m back to being a criminologist (an authoritative position, esp. for a woman, trying to counter problematic “common sense” notions of crime and punishment and the violence they build). With my friends at the law school, in my grant writing, and when navigating the courthouse or the public defender’s office, I’m a sociolegal scholar. I end the day, naturally, fragmented…and dreaming of freedom schools. All of this morphing, of course, depends upon unwieldy balancing acts: the social relations; the institutional settings; the historical and political moment; the stage of our life and career; the necessity, strategy, and weight of translation; and how we view ethical and political commitments to knowledge, practice, and liberation.
In maneuvering between them, I always feel productively undercut by what Foucault asks in his analysis of the insurrection of knowledges:
“What types of knowledge are you trying to disqualify when you say that you are a science? What speaking subject, what discursive subject, what subject of experience and knowledge are you trying to minorize when you begin to say: “I speak this discourse, I am speaking a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist.” What theoretico-political vanguard are you trying to put on the throne in order to detach it from all the massive, circulating, and discontinuous forms that knowledge can take.” (“Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976,p10).
I understand that we must, by necessity, be named, but I believe we are always more than this in some usefully un-nameable way. As is our work. If we hold to the notion that we no longer pursue objects but actions, then, knowledge must be configured as an agent taking various forms: dominant, canonical, supremacist, local, discontinuous, disqualified, lived, contested, resisted, refused. In that sense, moving with and without legit identities across borders remains for me – as a constituent thinker of punishment and society - the key to the transformative: knowledge for freedom by any and all means.
Michelle Brown
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