ABSTRACT
One of the defining characteristics of criminology is its lack of a stable referent. Crime has no singular unifying or universal essence. It is a signifier of historically and culturally contingent designations of deviance. Crime and criminality are thus variably represented as labels, offences, acts, stigmas, symbols, creations of social control, legal fictions, markers of non-belonging or badges of resistance. This inherit instability of criminology’s referent is now more pronounced than ever before as the editors to this volume remind us in their introduction. This chapter examines how the politics of criminological research has been melded by the shifts in intellectual currents from deviance theories, critical, feminist and now southern criminologies. This chapter argues that choice of method for doing imaginative critical scholarship has blossomed, especially with the creation of the Internet and the instantaneous global production and dissemination of knowledges. Method is now largely a practical and not a political matter, shaped only by the criminological imagination. However, the politics of research remains deeply enmeshed in the shaping and scoping of research topics which are still seldom transparent except in reflexive research designs. What research questions attract funding, what theories shape the research framework, what is worthy of study and what is not all invariably involve some form of political calculation. The chapter concludes with some case studies of imaginative criminological research using online methodologies.
