Are you a criminologist or a sociologist? Susila Gurusami Responds

Disciplining Punishment Scholars: an Intersectional Reflection on Categorizing the Intellectual Self

My formal training and degrees would each label me as a sociologist; across undergrad, graduate school, a postdoc, and my current position as an assistant professor, I’ve been housed in sociology departments. But after I shifted my research during graduate school to focus on Black women’s experiences of criminalization, I began to experience a curious shift—especially while I was ABD on the job market—in which other sociologists began to toss the label “criminologist” my way. Yet, I find that criminologists often identify me a sociologist who studies crime—a marked distinction which criminologist colleagues have indicated they sometimes attribute to the theoretical bent in my work coupled with its activist aims.

The simplest sort of reflection I can provide on this process is that I most closely align with the discipline of sociology; my professional association memberships, the service I engage in, and much of the literatures I reference read as the profile of a sociologist. But how might these external classificatory processes—as sociologist, criminologist, or something else—reveal how punishment scholars experience disciplinary policing? And for punishment scholars whose work is also activist-oriented and/or focuses on race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other social locations, how might liminality between disciplines reflect the white- and male-centric orientations of both sociology and criminology? Because I think when we ask the question “Is this a sociologist” or “Is this criminologist,” we’re inherently engaging in a project of identifying who a sociologist or criminologist is not. Too often, these answers are inextricably bound up in positionality in ways that refuse underrepresented scholars a firm position in either discipline. 

I think the ways we navigate these tensions is an inherently political project. For instance, what would it mean for me—as a woman of color who draws from Black feminisms to study punishment—to claim my scholarship as squarely within the sociological tradition? Does this make more room within sociology for voices like my own? 

Rather than posing answers to these questions, I instead think we might consider how interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship press intellectual innovation and expand the boundaries of the academy. The sense that one’s position as a firmly disciplinary scholar matters is often important to those of us whose lives are tied up in universities, but those distinctions tend to mean very little to our undergraduate students and the broader public. My own work has benefitted enormously from exploring outside the bounds of my discipline—by reading Black feminist geography, media and cultural studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, and Black radical anthropology—I’ve learned to push back on the assumptions I was trained to make as a sociologist. And without question, it’s made me a more critical, curious, and committed scholar.

What do we stand to gain if the types of research questions we ask take primacy over disciplinary loyalty or belonging? And how might this breaking down of disciplinary boundaries help to make the Academy more inclusive?