Abstract

Detailed engagement with research is commonly consigned to methods courses, often treated with suspicion or disdain as technocratic and resisted or avoided by students. It is typically divided off from courses on theory as if the two are easily separable. Yet research and the critical analysis of the construction of knowledge are fundamental to what we do as criminologists and especially to the perspectives described as critical criminology. For instance, the recognition of crime as a moral and political construct that is not fixed in time or place, that there is 'no ontological reality of crime', has profound theoretical and methodological implications that challenge the very notion that there might be a discipline of criminology (Young 2002: 254; Barton et al 2007:207). While this is acknowledged and given weight in some criminological traditions it is ignored by others.This chapter can provide only a limited account of the large, diverse and fluid field of critical criminological research. In doing so it risks suggesting greater consistency and uniformity than the field contains and will necessarily gloss over key debates, tensions and controversies in what is a continually unfolding area.