Are you a criminologist or a sociologist? Erin Kerrison Responds

Erin’s 2¢ on Crim/Soc Labeling

Hello, heroes!!

When asked to contribute to this conversation about the tensions that emerge regarding a “mismatched” or “uncommon” disciplinary home base, I jumped at the chance.  The question of “Wait, where do you come from, Erin?” gets posed often enough that I’ve grown perfectly comfortable answering it, but I realize that the question might feel like an interrogation for folks who aren’t as blasé about the academic community’s need to classify them in such a way.  

Since my guess is that different readers who are also grappling with versions of that question might appreciate advice for different contexts, I’m going to try and hit the domains that I think would peak the majority of folks’ interests (and where I’ve most often had to defend, justify, or explain a training history that differed from the setting’s norm): job searching, publishing, grant-writing. 

To begin, I’ll share that I study the myriad of ways that punishment meted out by the criminal legal system, in its many manifestations, is overwhelmingly toxic in general and is specifically harmful to the health of a range of stakeholders who must engage it – victims, alleged criminals, convicted folks, and personnel operating in these spaces.  I started out majoring in Sociology and Philosophy while an undergraduate, moved on to study Criminology and Law & Society in graduate school, split my time between an Arts & Sciences department of Criminology and the Law School during my postdoc, and am now an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley.  

The road from Philosophy to Criminal Justice to Social Work is very clear to me, but I realize how it may look to others and why the disciplinary-home-base question gets asked as often as it does.  So to that end, I’ll speak to how I navigate that ask authentically and strategically on the job hunt for a research university tenure-track position, while producing inter/trans-disciplinary scholarship, and in my efforts to secure funding to keep all the trains running. 

Job Market

I don’t think anyone needs to be anchored in a discipline as much as they need to have a very clear and feasible research agenda. While we would all like to claim otherwise, a lot folks are doing just fine professionally without doing work that is objectively earth-shattering. That’s 100% okay!! Because what matters is that they do their thing and they do It well.  

For example, if you’re training is in epidemiology and you’re committed to understanding the spread of disease of immigrant detention centers, the world (and the academy) needs you!!  The study of the spread of disease is not a new research focus. Getting to the bottom of what’s going on in a space that’s swelling exponentially, during an extremely fraught political moment, to people who leave onlookers polarized about their right to live, and in a country where protections provided by the state range from meager to absent to destructive… now that’s something about which folks in a number of social science contexts would be interested to learn.  

Yes, it’s important to demonstrate your ability to mentor students and teach courses in the department/unit/school to which you’re applying.  However, I have applied to and been offered positions in a variety of programs because I designed a strong research program with implications germane to the collective agendas of a number of different disciplinary stakeholders. 

Scholarship

Write to the readership!! Write to the readership!! Write to the readership!! 

So, let’s back up… admittedly I feel comfortable sending manuscripts to Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Sociology journals, simply because I speak those languages.  What I’ve found from working with colleagues in other disciplines, however, is that while some of their constructs aren’t immediately obvious to me, I know that they’re definitely talking about the same issues and questions that I’m thinking and writing about, too.  

Now I’m not itching to run out and earn another PhD, but in order to help facilitate interpretation and engagement with these folks, I have committed to learning some canonical fundamentals from Public Health, Anthropology, Law, and Psychology.  This has taken a lot of time for me as I’ve never been able to cut corners on just sitting still and doing the reading.  I can promise you that it was worth every effort, though, and will likely be an endless pursuit of mine.  

The bit of thematic familiarity that I’ve been able to assemble from those discourses has allowed me to meaningfully cite the existing debates in those disciplines and publish manuscripts in those outlets. And, it’s not enough to just pepper in a couple of citations from the “foreign” journal if you want to publish your work there.  Editors and reviewers can see right through the lip-service and will likely (and fairly) dismiss tourist scholars.

Fear not, though.  If you prefer not to write to a readership that engages terms or methods outside of your scope, that doesn’t preclude a conversation with thinkers in that space. I encourage everyone to shamelessly promote their work wherever they want and in front of as varied an audience as they possibly can.  You never know who will pick it up, plus you’ll get reps in understanding how your work is received by a diverse audience. 

Grants

When you’re asking people to give you money to do a thing, I venture that one of the biggest questions reviewers ask, is whether you can pull off what you it is you’re proposing.  

This may not mean that you need to have a specific disciplinary training as much as you will need to have team members and key collaborators who do.  That also doesn’t mean that you can’t still be a PI on the proposed study that diverges from your scholarly norm. Partnering with someone who offers complimentary training, perspectives, and networks can actually be very attractive to funders who want to see more interdisciplinary research projects anyway.  

The way I was able to secure funding from the National Institutes of Health was to apply for a training grant.  An existing multi-year randomized controlled trial that explored women’s engagement with a residential mindfulness drug treatment curriculum was already funded, underway, and staffed by researchers trained in Psychology and Medicine.  I applied for funding that would support my (1) sociological contributions about the influence of social networks on recovery outcomes (a phenomena that wasn’t included in the PI’s original scope of work) and (2) my training in biomedical substance abuse research.  This was a fantastic opportunity to explore the methods of a completely different intellectual arena and my hailing from an entirely different discipline is the very thing that was most attractive about my candidacy.  I encourage every one of you to look beyond your immediate environments to identify networks and efforts that are just waiting to be enhanced by your brilliance and inimitably fresh perspective.

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Frankly, a nontrivial proportion of the “where are you from?” line of questioning reminds me of the discomfort that folks feel when your phenotypical race or gender expression, for example, is somehow ambiguous. They like, neeeeed to know “what you are” in large part because it helps them to calibrate their expectations of what you’ll say or do and what kind of power(s) you might wield.  Nobody has time for that.

What’s nice about disciplinary fluidity is that you get to disrupt assumptions, own your narrative, and present the most authentic and effectual version of yourself.  I think it’s a plus and I encourage folks who find themselves without an obvious disciplinary home, to craft their own.  Nimble is good. Proud and nimble is even better. 

Tell the truest story that you’d want to hear and then to treat yourself to it. 

Are you a criminologist or a sociologist? Phil Goodman Responds

In trying to answer the question ‘Are you a criminologist or a sociologist?’ I keep going back to a story my late grandfather used to tell when people asked him what kind of scientist he was. He would explain, sly grin on his face, that when he’s surrounded by mostly chemists, he always says he is a physicist. When surrounded by mostly physicists, on the other hand, he would invariably answer chemist. (He was, by training, a crystallographer, and by experience a metrologist.) I suppose, after some reflection, I feel somewhat parallel. Neither of the labels, “criminologist” or “sociologist,” is all that intrinsically appealing to me. And, even more in line with my grandfather, when I attend, for instance, the American Society of Criminology (ASC) meetings in the states, I feel very sociological. By that I suppose I really mean that I think of my work as rather more theoretical, critical, and politically-motivated than the vast majority of the papers I hear at ASC meetings. Conversely, while at various sociological meetings, I often feel that because of my focus on punishment, prisons, and law, I tend to be labelled by many around me as a criminologist, by which I think they mean to say not-quite-sociological-enough. In other words, rather “applied” and, perhaps, not theoretical enough.

Instead of trying to work to get people to see me as an “insider,” I have embraced somewhat this phenomenon, in part because it allows me to slide somewhat quietly from group to group, and also because I feel like my ability to publish on various topics and using various methods is rather unconstrained. And I like that. In closing, I would note that I think my own relaxed attitude toward the policing of these labels is no doubt due, at least in part, to the fact that I have a great, tenure-track (and now tenured) position. Were my own employment unstable (or more unstable), I might very well lose more sleep over these labels, and the policing of them, than I do.

Are you a criminologist or a sociologist? David Garland Responds

Criminologist or sociologist? Which are you? Which am I? Most of the time the answer doesn’t matter much. But there are moments of decision – Which graduate program to choose? Which job market to go on? Which job offer to accept? – when it can matter a great deal. And the nature of one’s professional identity can sometimes take on an expressive or even an existential significance that prompts us to give the question some thought. 

Is there a tension between the two identities or affiliations? I don’t really think so: more of a fluidity, as with different points on a social science continuum. If there is a tension, it is mostly just an expression of the division between the general discipline and the specialist subfield; and most of us find it relatively easy to navigate back and forth between these domains. (Many of us belong to general and specialist professional associations; attend both kinds of conference; have scholarship networks that stretch across both, and so on.) It is possible, I suppose, that the usual tension has been somewhat aggravated by criminology’s increasingly forceful claim to be a stand-alone subject with its own disciplinary institutions. And the resulting distinction may seem more important in the US, where there is something of a status gap between sociology programs in the leading research universities and criminology or criminal justice departments that are more often in lower tier institutions. Elsewhere, the professional hierarchies are different. 

How does one choose between affiliations, to the extent that this is necessary? For myself, the answer is situational: it depends where I am and who I’m talking to. And I notice that when other people identify me in one way or the other – in reviews, introductions, in passing references, etc. – they also appear to be influenced by context, mostly choosing the identity that makes most sense to them in that setting. (I have occasionally thought that a reviewer chose to identify me in a particular way the better to dismiss my claims, but that’s probably just paranoia on my part.)

I can’t think of many occasions when the choice of labels has presented itself as a problem, though I have occasionally felt the need to distance myself from the Lombrosian project that some people still associate with criminology. And I’m on record as being a critic of criminology’s quest for disciplinary independence, preferring to address crime and punishment as specific cases of more general sociological phenomena. 

Most of the time, I think of myself as a criminological sociologist or a sociological criminologist – though I’m happy to go by the name of “legal academic,” “historian” or “socio-legal scholar” as the occasion requires. (My Edinburgh University doctorate is actually in “Socio-Legal Studies” but that name referred more to a 1980s higher education funding stream than to an established scholarly discipline.) There isn’t any great ideological divide between any of these identities, so there’s rarely any great pressure to choose between them. The joys of interdisciplinarity! However I do recall arriving at Berkeley’s Law and Society Center in the late 1980s and immediately being asked by a graduate student whether I identified with “law and society” or “critical legal studies” – the implication appearing to be that I was obliged to take sides in a sectarian dispute of which I was then mostly ignorant.  

Are the authors of recent books on “mass incarceration” or “punishment and society” properly described as “criminologists?” I’m not sure. British academics might call them “penologists” but that sounds rather archaic so the better term is probably “sociologists of punishment” or something of the sort. (Full disclosure: I once held a personal chair at Edinburgh University that styled me as “Professor of Penology” but, if truth be told, the chief reason for that name choice was to ensure my promotion did not undermine the case for appointing someone else to a chair in Criminology that had recently fallen vacant in the same department.) 

Given the concern of my own work to connect criminological scholarship with social theory and general sociology, I would be more than happy to be recognized as contributing to the wider as well as the narrower field: to have an impact in the broader discipline and not just my specialist subject. But that may be idiosyncratic. I certainly know of, and greatly admire, some very distinguished careers that have been fully undertaken within the scope of the criminological field in ways that weren’t in the least bit intellectually narrow. 

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?

Are you a criminologist or a sociologist? Ben Crewe Responds

Last year, I contributed to a departmental panel discussing the future of criminology at which each panellist expressed some ambivalence about declaring himself or herself a straightforward ‘criminologist’. One had trained as a historian; another as a natural scientist. I explained that I was a sociologist by background, and still considered this my primary academic identity: my Master’s degree was in Sociology, and I then spent four years as a doctoral researcher in a mainstream sociology department at the University of Essex, where my research was not in any way criminological.

My transition into the field of criminology altered my intellectual practices, at least initially. As a sociologist in a sociology department, I read sociology journals; as a sociologist in a criminology department, my reading narrowed, because of the set of journals, scholars and studies that began to feel more salient for my new institutional and disciplinary existence. It goes without saying that articles in criminology journals are very often informed by concepts, theories and ideas that draw from a much wider field of study. Criminology is, after all, a ‘rendez-vous discipline’ (Downes 1988) – a place where other disciplines meet, and exchange ideas– and is rightly celebrated for its intellectual eclecticism. But ‘straight criminology’ articles often seem pretty thin in terms of their theoretical and conceptual inputs, and some criminological theory courses do not push students to look very far beyond a relatively limited range of thinkers and issues. One of my concerns about the growth of criminology undergraduate degrees is that students can now advance into the discipline without having read much of the foundational theory of social science, which itself undergirds a good deal of the theory that is central to criminological research. My own work has been informed, over the years, by theorists such as Weber, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Margaret Archer, and by ideas taken from political science, moral anthropology and psychoanalysis. I would like to think that it has been enhanced as a result. It has certainly helped me make better sense of the world that I study.

I have never felt excluded or marginalised as a consequence of being a sociologist working within criminology. If anything, in the UK, sociology feels like the primary disciplinary influence on the field. Being a penologist is a slightly different matter. Although most definitions of criminology refer to responses or reactions to the breaking of laws, sometimes I detect an informal hierarchy in the minds of scholars who study the causes of crime, in which studies of prisons, probation and other aspects of the criminal justice system are subordinate to their concerns. I have very little interest in this kind of policing of disciplinary boundaries. All disciplines and departments need boundaries, but I am suspicious of the people who are most keen to monitor them (there’s a criminological theme right there). My way of navigating these issues is to get on with my work, to try to ignore the internal politics of the discipline, and to proudly retain my interests and identity as a sociologist.

Are you a criminologist or a sociologist? Megan Comfort Responds

My PhD is in sociology and I think of myself as a sociologist. However, I usually work in interdisciplinary teams, and my role within a given study is shaped by what I bring to the table in relation to my colleagues. I currently am involved in several studies with collaborators who are public health researchers, psychologists, social workers, epidemiologists, and physicians. On some projects, the entire team has extensive knowledge about criminal justice issues and I strive to be a good thought partner on those matters and to take initiative when it comes to bringing a sociological perspective to our research. On other studies, I have been included specifically to contribute expertise on the repercussions of incarceration, community supervision, and other forms of direct and indirect involvement with the criminal justice system on people’s lives; my colleagues on those projects might consider me to be a criminologist. In general, I feel very fortunate to work in an environment that embraces interdisciplinary collaboration and encourages us to exercise different pockets of our knowledge – sociological, criminological, and otherwise.

Megan Comfort, RTI International

Are you a criminologist or a sociologist? Michelle Brown Responds

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