Ghost Criminology review symposium: Editors’ response

Abstract

The Ghost Criminology collection is an attempt to both capture and survey the seeming 'spectral turn' that has occurred within the discipline. The contributors were invited to consider the spectral within their on-going research projects or to explore how it might be applied to the criminological. To be clear, when we refer to this as a ghost criminology, we are using this as a conceptual metaphor. This is not an exploration of the supernatural. Rather, it is a means to examine phenomena that hover between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. It hopes to capture a sense of time experienced as 'out of joint' and the implications that has for the study of crime, criminality and punishment. We employ the language of spectrality and haunting to explore the lingering effects of violence, the traces and atmospheres of sub-cultures, and -in Derrida's phrasing -the secret of kept secrets. Our hope, then, was to provide some initial shape to an emerging sub-discipline of ghost criminology. In this we owe a considerable debt to Avery Gordon's (2008) Ghostly Matters. It provided a framework to examine individuals and groups subject to violences that excluded them from the disciplinary archives and visual systems. Gordon's ( 2008) over-arching argument is that Sociology has not contended with its ghosts -the lingering effects of colonial practice, its subjugation of knowledge, and a complicity in patriarchal capitalism. Our aim with the collection was to extend this approach to criminology. It is a means for the discipline to reckon with its past, its inheritance and debts, whilst also providing a means to conceptualise how the future acts on and through the present. In doing so, we have also been drawn towards Derrida's notion of hauntology. In Mark Fisher's (2014) phrasing, hauntology explores how the forces of the no longer and not yet can be felt in the now. To put this slightly differently, Brown (2001, 149-150) phrases it that [w]e inherit not 'what really happened' to the dead but what lives on from that happening […] and inspirit[s] our imaginations and visions for the future