Demi Patsios, Paddy Hillyard, Sarah Machniewski, Francesca Lundström and David Taylor
This paper attempts to assess the consequences of the existing and unfolding inequalities in older age in Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (RoI).
Abstract
Purpose
This paper attempts to assess the consequences of the existing and unfolding inequalities in older age in Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (RoI).
Design/methodology/approach
The research involved both quantitative and qualitative methods including focus groups and analysis of existing data on social exclusion and poverty in NI and RoI.
Findings
The analysis on publicly available data in the north and south of Ireland revealed few comparable measures on poverty and social exclusion. The study was, however, able to establish key pre‐ and intra‐recession differences between older people in both jurisdictions. The qualitative analysis (focus groups with older people, online surveys with financial advisors) detailed the similarities and differences in the impact of the recession in north and south.
Originality/value
This paper reports on the first systematic, comparative study into the impact of the recession on older people in NI and RoI. The paper also makes recommendations for improving data collection on measures which would allow policy makers and researchers to examine the current and future impact of the recession on the living standards and wellbeing of older people.
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In response to the divides identified by some UK writers between critical legal scholarship, left political agendas, and empirical, policy-driven, socio-legal research, and…
Abstract
In response to the divides identified by some UK writers between critical legal scholarship, left political agendas, and empirical, policy-driven, socio-legal research, and indications of similar divides in the US, this essay seeks to demonstrate the possibilities for work that negotiates between progressive political commitments, social and political theory, policy concerns, and social scientific approaches to the interface between law and society. It does so by reference to three case studies of critical, feminist socio-legal scholarship, which address policy issues in the areas of family law, the legal profession, and access to justice.
The illegalisation of solidarities towards migrants with irregular status provides critical insights into the limits that EU governments set to the free movement, speech, and…
Abstract
The illegalisation of solidarities towards migrants with irregular status provides critical insights into the limits that EU governments set to the free movement, speech, and action of their citizens and their consequences. Here, the author outlines why and how, in a scenario of illegalisation, solidarities must come to terms with inherent contradictions, because the very nature of these solidarities, in terms of who can perform them, may reproduce specific dynamics of structural inequalities. Particularly questioning who rescues, and who can rescue, and who cannot, implies the acknowledgement that solidarities, and visible resistance, are not always democratic, but instruments of the privileged that reproduce social stratification. By critically engaging in the development of activist criminology, the author argues that the democratisation of solidarities would entail that all individuals have the same possibilities and incur the same risks if confronted with a scenario of illegalisation. But such democratisation is a chimera, meaning that there are social hierarchies of who is allowed to rescue, and who would have too much to lose. This also suggests relevant implications for criminologists who choose not to divorce from a commitment to solidarity activism. In fact, activist criminologists often work ‘at a distance’, dispose of continued access to valuable resources and networks, and make a career based on their activist work. These elements of privilege inevitably provide them with disproportionate power in activist spaces, whose critical acknowledgement is paramount and must be complemented with radical action to progressively work towards a deconstruction of their own incongruencies.
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Tamari Kitossa and Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz
Purpose: To critically explore the implications of the August 2020, decision by Carleton University’s Institute for Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) to end to its intern…
Abstract
Purpose: To critically explore the implications of the August 2020, decision by Carleton University’s Institute for Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) to end to its intern program with the Ottawa police, the RCMP, Correctional Services Canada and Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre starting in Fall 2021.
Findings: In contrast to the negative reaction of Kevin Haggerty to this decision, the authors offer a strong but qualified endorsement of the ICCJ’s move to put an end to its internship with coercive institutions. The ICCJ strategically mobilized discourses of anti-Blackness and inclusion in response to the murder of George Floyd and the individual and communitarian traumas of Black, First Nations and Metis and students colour in its program. The ICCJ did not, however, substantively engage with the ways that criminology, sociology and the university are complicit through the legitimation practices and processes of ideology, professionalization and research in the ‘violence work’ of the state. The critique, ethics and logical conclusion of abolitionism are obfuscated.
Methodology/Approach: The authors explicitly draw on the Black Radical Tradition, Neo-Marxism and radical neo-Weberianism to sketch research possibilities that resist the university as a space of violence work, both in criminology and in the professionalization of policing.
Originality/Value: The debate between the ICCJ and Kevin Haggerty is an important opportunity to critically analyze the limits of critical criminology and lacunae of a debate about abolitionism, anti-criminology and university-state nexus as a site for the production of ideological and hardware violence work. Grounded in the Black Radical Tradition, neo-Marxism and radical neo-Weberianism, the authors sketch a framework for a research agenda toward the abolition of criminology.