ABSTRACT
Critical criminologists examine a myriad of social problems, ranging from violence against women, to predatory street crime, to state or government crime. They also study timely and important issues outside the realm of criminology as it is commonly known. For example, US critical criminologist Raymond
Michalowski and his intimate partner anthropologist Jill Dubisch (2001) conducted an ethnographic study of a “secular pilgrimage” involving a motorcycle journey from southern California to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC. Consisting of Vietnam veterans, Michalowski and Dubisch joined this “run for the wall” in their hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona and ended up involved in a study that describes, in their words, “a journey that is both a physical passage through the nation and a spiritual and emotional journey toward healing and understanding” (p. ix). Victoria Pitts-Taylor is another critical criminologist who “wears two hats.” In addition to co-developing and testing a feminist routine activities theory of campus sexual assault (see Schwartz and Pitts, 1995), she does in-depth qualitative research on the experience, meanings, and motivations for cosmetic surgeries (Pitts-Taylor, 2007). Joseph Donnermeyer is one more prime example of a prominent critical criminologist who can balance more than one research project at the same time. Widely recognized as a pioneer in rural criminology, Donnermeyer also conducts studies of old order Amish social life in both Canada and the United States.1 Cultural criminologists, too, are well known for doing empirical work outside the realm of conventional criminology. Consider Jeff Ferrell’s (2006) ethnographic project on “dumpster diving” and studies of “edgework,”2 such as advanced sky diving (Ferrell, Hayward, and Young, 2008; Lyng, 1990, 2005). Many more examples of non-criminological research done by critical criminologists could easily be provided, such as Canadian scholar Stephen Muzzatti’s (2005) analysis of mass media coverage of the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in the spring of 2003. The key point here is that critical criminology is much more than a theoretical and/or political enterprise. It also entails “cutting edge” research on crimes at the top, crimes at the bottom, societal reactions to these harms, and how crime, law, and social control are influenced by broader social, political, cultural, and economic forces. The main objective of this chapter is to provide some major examples of recent critical criminological empirical contributions. It must be emphasized, though, that the studies
reviewed in this chapter should not be considered superior to those not examined. Certainly, critical criminologists have attended to a legion of substantive topics and thus it is impossible to do them all justice in a short chapter or book.
