ABSTRACT
This postscript is in part a postmortem, noting as it does the death of criminological method – or at least the death of what many once imagined criminological method to be. For those steeped in positivist ideologies, criminological method seemed a guarantor of detached objectivity, a foundation for comprehensive understanding, and a guard against the subjective and the unpredictable. Over the past few decades, a combination of intellectual critiques and evolving global circumstances have conspired to destroy, for all but the truest of believers, this sense of criminological method and its merits. Many of us have instead begun to imagine method as more a fluid process of engagement with a world that is itself increasingly ill-defined and adrift – that is, to see method as more a tentative orientation than a set of technical certainties. In this sense the death of criminological method is at the same time its re-birth. In this new life, criminological method is mobilized, animated by openness and innovation, and attuned to features of liquid social life largely excluded from its earlier incarnation: the spectral and the interstitial, the visual and the autoethnographic. In this new life, criminological method holds perhaps the possibility of revitalizing criminology itself.
