ABSTRACT
Within criminology, deviant knowledge seeks to promote critical voices and challenge the priorities and policies of conservative and socially unjust state and corporate enterprises. It is a project of resistance and dissent: one that promotes critique, challenges political power and certain concepts of social order; and one that pursues truth from a position of intellectual autonomy and as both critic and conscience of society. Scraton argues that deviant voices are found in critical criminological narratives that must serve contemporary society as a form of 'knowledges of resistance'. Such knowledges, he argues, cannot be generated under government or corporate contract, where they are often silenced or neutralized. In a similar vein, Stan Cohen advocated the need for deviant criminological knowledges in States of Denial as a way to avoid the risk of 'intellectual denial', where: well-functioning minds become closed, and the gaze is averted from the uglier parts of their ideological blueprints and experiments.
