ABSTRACT
Criminal justice studies addressing the intersecting categories of race, class, and gender are now regarded as important, though underexamined, domains of ideological and experiential investigation. Postmodern criminologists view language as value laden, nonneutral and politically charged. In the process of situating oneself and being inserted within the parameters of a language system, the other produces a circumscribed knowledge. Conventional criminology privileges “scientific” knowledge and, thus, its linguistic coordinates represent the dominant discourse in justice-based investigations. The application of postmodern principles of sense-making to law and criminology challenges and disrupts the sedimented icons of modernist justice. Conventional theory-building in criminology begins by invoking the uniquely encoded discourse of the master. The postmodern challenge that awaits is to identify and assess those values, those assumptions, embedded in sociological and ontological themes of criminological concern fostering the oppression of disparate groups.
