Methodology

Authors: Paddy Hillyard, Joe Sim, Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte

If academic criminology currently stands in rude health, this obscures a range of deeply disturbing trends in the content of the discipline. We begin by exploring the recent boom in Home Office funded research in criminology, examining the key theoretical and empirical issues that have been both included and excluded from the official research agenda. The content and expanding nature of this agenda is then placed within the wider context of the entrepreneurialisation of universities, particularly with respect to the marketisation of academic research and the disciplinary, self-regulatory effects that follow from this. As a paradigmatic process within these wider trends, we subject the Research Assessment Exercise to critical scrutiny. We conclude by noting some strategies that criminologists might pursue to combat the increasingly narrow and pernicious research agenda funded and sanctioned by the state.

Author: Carolyn Nordstrom

Research at the frontlines of wars shows that the realities of war are quite different from the public presentations of war. The experiences of those surviving in the midst of war are frequently worlds apart from the ‘‘images’’ of political violence (mis)portrayed in public media, formal military texts, the literature, and war museums. This has allowed for a number of myths about war and human aggression to hold sway in both academic and popular culture that, as the basis for policies, can actually further harm those subjected to war.