{"id":4644,"date":"2021-08-12T14:00:54","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T04:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/?p=4644"},"modified":"2021-08-12T14:00:54","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T04:00:54","slug":"keynote-decolonizing-criminology-through-the-inclusion-of-epistemologies-of-the-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/2021\/08\/12\/keynote-decolonizing-criminology-through-the-inclusion-of-epistemologies-of-the-south\/","title":{"rendered":"Keynote: Decolonizing Criminology through the inclusion of epistemologies of the south"},"content":{"rendered":"

QUT Centre for Justice Theme Leader Professor Kerry Carrington provided the keynote address at the (on-line) British Society of Criminology Conference 2021<\/strong> on 7-9 July 2021.<\/p>\n

The following appeared in the British Society of Criminology Blog (The BSC Blog<\/strong>)<\/p>\n

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Kerry Carrington is a Research Professor at the Centre for Justice Queensland University of Technology, and Fellow of the Academy of SocialSciences<\/em>. Kerry leads multi-lingual research teams across the globe on southernizing criminology projects. She\u2019s the Founding Editor of the Open Access International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What needs de-colonising? \u00a0Metropolitan thinking in criminology<\/strong><\/p>\n

Metropolitan thinking rests on a linear, panoramic and unifying standpoint in which space, and geo-political and social difference, are erased in the imperial narrative of time. This temporal logic constructs societies peripheral to the epicentres of colonial power as backward. Hence the division of the world into \u2018developing\u2019 and \u2018developed\u2019, \u2018first\u2019 and \u2018third\u2019 worlds, in which the global north is depicted as leading <\/em>the way to an advanced stage of civilisation (Carrington and Hogg et al, 2018: 6). A multitude of perspectives, de-colonial, post-colonial, Indigenous, southern, southern feminist, and subaltern theories have criticised this way of dividing the world and measuring human progress (Aas, 2012; Agozino, 2010; Brown, 2018; Campos, 2018;\u00a0Carrington et al., 2016; Connell, 2007; Cunneen, 2018; de Magalh\u00e3es Gomes, 2018; \u00a0de Sousa Santos, 2014; Leon, 2021;\u00a0 Lui, 2009; 2017; Mignolo, 2011; Travers, 2019).<\/p>\n

According to this logic, social phenomena in the \u2018periphery\u2019 would be investigated from the standpoint of universal theories and laws of development generated in \u2018modern\u2019 or \u2018Western\u2019 societies of the Global North (Connell, 2007). The South could be mined for data, as for other raw materials, but little in the way of novel ideas or theoretical insights of anything more than local interest could be yielded by the social scientific enterprise in the South. Connell calls this \u2018metropolitan\u2019 thinking (Connell 2007: 215).\u00a0 We argue this has also been true for criminology (Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo, 2016).<\/p>\n

Why southern? A metaphor for centre\/periphery relations of power<\/strong><\/p>\n

Raewyn Connell deliberately chose the label southern for three reasons. First, to direct attention to periphery-centre relations of power and the epistemic privilege of the universities of the global north, where around 90% of the world\u2019s journals, universities, resources for doing research reside. The south is conceptualised as a metaphor for the unequal economic, political and intellectual power relations embedded in metropolitan thinking. Second, to highlight the fact that social theory can be developed from the periphery \u2013 not just the centres of power and epistemic privilege. And third, that social thought is positioned \u2013 specific to place and the land, not universal or timeless (Connell, 2007: viii-ix). This means there are multiple – not dichotomous- epistemologies of south and north, east and west, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. \u00a0When taken in its metaphorical sense, the \u2018south\u2019 refers to the peripheral voices located anywhere in the world. The South and North are not homogeneous or mutually exclusive spaces or categories. This is a prominent theme in the work of critical criminologists like Elliot Currie, who argues that \u2018we cannot begin to grasp either the nature or origins of America\u2019s outsized problem of violent crime (or of punishment) without placing the \u2018Southern\u2019 legacy in the foreground\u2019 (Currie, 2018: 44).\u00a0 He is referring to the history of slavery and transportation of 10-15 million Africans to the Americas (north and south) from the 16th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Border thinking and de-colonising knowledge<\/strong><\/p>\n

Boaventura de Sousa Santos stresses that the task of de-colonising knowledge is complex, gigantic, and in some contexts, born of struggle against capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism (2020: 220-27).\u00a0 He argues there are two main projects of de-colonising knowledge \u2013 one negative and the other positive. The negative championed by decolonial theory is to critique and root out ethnocentric, racist and anglocentric biases of knowledge systems. This journey has many champions. The positive and more challenging project is the constructive work of building the epistemologies of the south (de Santos Sousa, 2020: 226). The plural is deliberate as the key to disrupting the hegemony of northern epistemologies is to build diverse epistemologies, through what he calls border thinking. This journey has fewer champions, of which I am one.<\/p>\n

de Sousa Santos argues there can be no global justice without cognitive justice (de Sousa Santos 2014: viii). Like Connell, he is critical of the way the history of the social sciences has projected itself as an emancipatory project while its modernist ideals remained based on the experience of metropolitan societies (de Sousa Santos 2014: 71). However, unlike many post-or de-colonial theorists who see little worth recovering from Northern theories, de Sousa Santos does imagine that a non-Occidentalist West is a possibility (de Sousa Santos 2014: 114). Consequently, he rejects the reductionism of post-colonial\/decolonial theories that reify and essentialise concepts, such as Eastern or Indigenous knowledge and stand them in outright opposition to Western scientific knowledge (de Sousa Santos 2014: 212). Rather, he opts for border thinking, inter-cultural thinking and ways of knowing which offer an escape from the colonising effects of the global episteme. He defines these alternative knowledges as necessarily limited as opposed to the universalising claims of metropolitan thought (de Sousa Santos 2014: 212). Border thinking occurs in the spaces in between, with the view that \u2018knowledges that may be refounded, reconfigured, and reconstructed in such a way that they may be put at the service of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal struggles\u2019 (de Sousa Santos, 2020: 225).\u00a0 It is futile to challenge the global hierarchy of knowledge by resurrecting alternative origin stories or \u2018founding fathers\u2019, as some de-colonial theorists have done. This engages in the same rhetorical strategy of producing false binaries as does\u00a0metropolitan thought (Connell, 2007: xi).<\/p>\n

Southernizing criminology as a salve for its metropolitan thinking<\/strong><\/p>\n

The southernizing of criminology acts as a salve for the biases of metropolitan thinking (Hughes, 2020: 194). Southern criminologies (and the plural is deliberate as there is no single unifying voice from the global south), contest the universalism of theories based on knowledge specific to English speaking countries of the north Atlantic world. They question linear models of progress and colonialist constructions of justice used in criminology to measure other justice systems as backward, exotic or primitive and challenge criminological theories that erase the historical legacies of colonialism, slavery and structured global inequality.<\/p>\n

As a theoretical project the southernizing of criminology seeks to reorient and correct hegemonic biases, to expand the repertoire of criminological knowledges beyond their heavily laden northern gaze. It is premised on the recognition that North and South are globally interconnected in ways and with effects, both historical and contemporary, which warrant careful inquiry and analysis in criminological research, theoretical, and policy agendas (Carrington et al 2016; 2019). De-colonising criminology steers a tricky pathway along what the Bengali social scientist Chakrabarty (2007) calls conceptual pragmatism that accepts knowledge is so embedded with metropolitan thought it is not possible to completely disentangle it from its hegemony (Chakrabarty, 2007) (see Brown 2018). But a criminology that aims to decenter, democratize and pluralize knowledge by injecting it with knowledge from the south and the periphery is<\/em> possible.\u00a0 Indeed, rather than creating divisions, southern criminologies seek to build epistemological bridges, based on the premise that an important form of decolonial action is achieved by \u2018affecting and transforming the contents of Western science, through the use of knowledge, realities and cosmologies\u2019 of the south (Goyes, 2018: 337).<\/p>\n

As an empirical project, epistemologies of the south seek to cultivate knowledges of and from the periphery that have been relatively invisible or marginalized (Alvirti et al., 2021; Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo, 2016; Carrington et al., 2018; Carrington, Goyes, et al., 2019; Goyes, 2019; Fonseca, 2018; Vald\u00e9s-Riesco, 2020). One of the emphases is to reinsert the historical legacies of colonialism back into analysis of contemporary crime and justice. Not in the same way as comparative criminology has done it, by drawing comparisons framed by an orientalism or elitism that constructs non-western societies as \u2018exotic,\u2019 \u2018primitive\u2019 or the \u2018other\u2019 (Liu, 2011; 2017). Southern epistemologies seek \u2018to contemplate life, crime and social order outside the metropolitan North, \u2026 (and) to find new ways of thinking about phenomena so that the South is understood on its own terms\u2019 (Brown, 2018: 83).<\/p>\n

One of the problems with theories of decolonisation, has been the tendency to\u00a0essentialise race and romanticise ethnicity. This argues Camilla de Magalh\u00e3es Gomes (2018; 2021), makes invisible the gender of colonality. She is critical of the lack of gender perspectives in the work of de-colonial theorists insisting that \u2018gender is a category of decolonial analysis\u2019 (de Magalh\u00e3es Gomes, 2021: 1). Attempts at de-colonizing feminist theory and social science are not new (eg. Mohanty, 1991; Lugones, 2010). What is relatively new is the emergence of southern feminisms (Campos, 2020; Giraldo, 2016; Lima Costa, 2014; Tlostanova, et al., 2016; Rodriguez Castro, 2020), that aim to docolonise and democratise feminist theory (Connell, 2015: 59), by embracing a mosaic of epistemologies (Connell, 2015: 59) using border thinking (Tlostanova, et al., 2016). \u2018Feminist border thinking is a horizontal transversal networking of different local histories and sensibilities mobilised through a number of common, yet pluriversal and open categories\u2019 (Tlostanov, et al., 2016: 217).<\/p>\n

As Leon Mossavi (2018) rightly points out, there have been previous attempts to unpack and jettison what he calls \u2018westernised criminology\u2019\u2014to trans-nationalize it (Aas, 2012; Bowling, 2011) and to decolonize it (Agozino, 2010; Cunneen, 2011; 2018). What differentiates southern criminologies from these critiques, however, is that it eschews the romanticization of \u2018the other\u2019; based on identity, class, race, Indigeneity or ethnicity (Cain, 2000). \u00a0That southern criminologies are not in principle oppositional projects which rest on identity politics, does not make them, as some armchair critics suggest, a form of incorporation or a bandwagon (Moosavi, 2020). Nor is it \u2018a defensive reflex, designed to exonerate Anglo-spheric theory from complicity in epistemic violence\u2019 (Blagg and Anthony, 2019: 6). Their book titled, Decolonising Criminology<\/em> critiques criminologies of the south without even referencing a single example. It was reviewed by Tharawal woman, Robyn Oxley an early career Indigenous scholar, who pointed out that Blagg and Anthony quote very few Indigenous scholars, concluding: \u2018For non-Aboriginal scholars who have built their careers on the backs of Aboriginal people, the time has come to make space for Indigenous scholars\u2019 (Oxley, 2020: 180-181).<\/p>\n

The crude simplistic critiques of southern criminologies published in privileged journals in United States and England overlook the many shared similarities between those who aim to decolonize knowledge through decolonial critique, what Dimou refers to as \u2018the decolonial option\u2019 (2021:1), and those who seek to decolonize knowledge through constructing southern epistemologies through border thinking and intercultural collaboration (i.e. Aliverti\u00a0 et al., 2019; Carrington, et al., 2016; Carrington, Goyes et al., 2019; Fonseca, 2018; Goyes, 2018; \u00a0Goyes and South, forthcoming; Lui, 2017; Travers, 2019; Walklate, 2016; Zaffaroni, 2015). Those who critique it as a project led by a bunch of Australians completely misunderstand how the southernizing of criminology pursues a series of practical decolonizing projects all over the world, involving hundreds if not thousands of scholars from a great many cultures, continents and languages. Many initiated by scholars in other languages, whose activities are rendered entirely invisible by these crude critiques. These projects create opportunities for border thinking and intercultural communication through real world conferences, discussion groups, open access journal publication, supporting scholars with southern criminology scholarships, mentoring, bi-lingual events and other collaborations. International conferences seeking to southernize criminology have been convened five times in Australia and twice in Latin America, both times with simultaneous translation, funded by QUT Centre for Justice.<\/a> Recently the Centre of Criminology, University of Oxford co-hosted a multi-lingual conference with Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina on Punishment in the Global Peripheries <\/a>\u00a0and formed a discussion group on southernizing criminology<\/a>. The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research<\/a> has established formal links with universities in the global south as a practical commitment to bridging global divides and decolonizing criminology. Universities in Latin America have been at the forefront of developing southern epistemologies, criminologies and southern feminisms for decades (eg Lugones, Mignolo, Sozzo and Zafaroni, leading figures in these debates are all from Argentina). The Asian Criminological Society<\/em><\/a>, has also been pioneering alternative knowledges to anglo-centric northern criminology since 2006 (Carrington, Goyes, et al., 2019).<\/p>\n

Another practical form of decolonisation is citing and publishing in Open Access journals which disseminate knowledge outside the capitalist model that makes knowledge a commodity behind paywalls. Criminology Open <\/a>\u00a0championed by Scott Jacques from Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia State University, Atlanta, is a practical illustration of how all of us can contribute to the democratisation of criminology, regardless of positionality or identity. This website provides open sources for students, academics and the public, and urges \u00a0<\/em>\u2018we must make our works freely available to everyone\u2019.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The open access journal published by QUT Centre for Justice, International Journal for Crime Justice and Social Democracy<\/em><\/a>, of which I am the founding editor, is dedicated to de-colonising and democratising knowledge through open access publishing, creative commons copyright ensuring authors retain their own intellectual property rights. It has:<\/p>\n