This book compiles the fieldwork experiences of 55 researchers, addressing the challenges, ethical considerations, and methodologies employed to study 30 diverse populations and phenomena within Criminology and Security Studies. This volume contributes to filling a gap in academic literature by highlighting the often unspoken realities and intricacies of fieldwork. The book is systematically structured into five thematic sections: The Powerful, The Invisible, The Vulnerable, The Violent, and The Cyber. These categories encompass various aspects and dimensions of fieldwork, including managing emotional distress, negotiating access through gatekeepers, ensuring the protection of informants, and exercising discretion in navigating sensitive issues. As a scholarly resource, this book is invaluable for academics, practitioners, and students involved in criminology, security studies, anthropology, sociology, and political science. By offering in-depth reflections and insights, this volume enhances the reader’s understanding of the nuances of fieldwork, and informs the development of robust and ethical research practices. Chapters 2, 9 and 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

In the field of victimology, the landscape of victimization is constantly evolving, presenting new challenges and demands. The traditional approaches to understanding and addressing victimization are often inadequate in capturing the complex and nuanced experiences of victims. Furthermore, the justice system and victim support services struggle to keep pace with the changing forms of victimization, leading to gaps in protection and support for victims. There is a critical need for a contemporary approach that comprehensively examines victimization and provides practical insights and solutions for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Investigating and Combating Gender-Related Victimization offers a pioneering solution to the challenges posed by modern victimization. By focusing exclusively on qualitative studies, this handbook provides a deep and nuanced understanding of victim experiences, interactions with the justice system, and the impact of victimization. The qualitative approach allows for a more holistic examination of victimization, capturing the emotions, narratives, and coping mechanisms of victims often overlooked in quantitative studies.

GERN (Groupement Européen de Recherches sur les Normativités) is a large consortium of scientific researchers in the domain of deviance and social control, more precisely studying delinquency, penal institutions, public policies of security and the importance of penal questions in society. The consortium is multidisciplinary. Today GERN is a scientific network present in ten European countries and abroad, uniting researchers of different disciplines. Each year the GERN organizes a doctoral summer school, giving PhD students from the consortium the opportunity to present and discuss their ongoing projects and research results as well as meet young and senior researchers. This is the third volume stemming from the annual doctoral conferences organized by the GERN. Last edition of the Summer School was held in September 2014 in Porto (Portugal). The selected theme for this Summer School was ‘Criminology, Security and Justice: methodological and epistemological issues’, searching for a fruitful debate about the methodological and epistemological aspects relevant for the development of PhD thesis. Scientific research is, in its essence, critical thinking. What is critical thinking? It is a kind of thinking that differs from magic reasoning, common sense, and speculation. Scientific evidence contrasts with belief, immediate and apparent knowledge, illusion and opinion. This is valid for every knowledge domain that claims to be scientific. It is thus true for the science of crime, criminology. With the inauguration of this Research Paper Series, GERN intends to monitor and disseminate cutting-edge studies into European security issues, reflecting the result of doctoral research in the framework of the GERN. The series provides an excellent platform from which to survey key emergent topics in the field. With this series the editors and authors are contributing to a better understanding of contemporary questions, presenting recent research results and scientific reflection, by devising new approaches and by re-evaluating the heritage of social sciences in this domain. It implies a new openness with regard to other disciplines and to the normative questions arising from the commission of crime and the formal reaction to it by actors in the criminal justice system and beyond.

Ethical principles and concerns are at the heart of criminological research and can arise at the planning, implementation and reporting stages. It is vital that researchers are aware of the issues involved so that they can make informed decisions about the implications of certain choices. This cutting-edge book charts the changing topography of ethics, governance and accountability for social science research in criminology, contributes to the developing discourse on research ethics and demonstrates the importance as to why research ethics should be taken seriously. Bringing together a range of experts who consider both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. This book examines the key issues and challenges of ethical research. Topics covered include: the measures in place to ensure ethical research practice for social scientists; the relationship between state funding and research findings; the challenge of researching sensitive areas; the changing face of governance and accountability for academic criminology. Research Ethics in Criminology is a comprehensive and accessible text that is ideal for students studying criminological research methods. Supplementary material includes key points, chapter summaries, critical thinking questions, key definitions, case examples, and recommendations for further reading. This book will provide a thorough grounding in the ethical issues faced by researchers, as well as an understanding of the role and purpose of ethics committees.

Ethnography has a long history in the humanities and social sciences and has provided the base line in the field of police studies for over 60 years. We have recently witnessed a resurgence in ethnographic practice among police scholars, and this Handbook is a response to that revival. Students and academics are returning to the ethnography arena and the study of police in situ to explain the evocative worlds of the police. The list of ethnographic sites is vast and all have fed the rejuvenation of ethnographic endeavour. Together they suggest innovation, theoretical depth, broad geographical boundaries, multi-site experiments, and multi-disciplinarity, all of which are central to the exploration of police and policing in the twenty-first century. This Handbook encapsulates the revival of police ethnography by exploring its multidisciplinary field and cataloguing the ongoing ethnographic work. It offers an original and international contribution to the field of police studies and research methods, providing a comprehensive and overarching guide to police ethnography. We see the previous classics in every page and still note the influence of the early ethnographers. At the same time, we see the innovative breadth and diversity of these narratives. The aim of this Handbook is to highlight the mosaic that is police ethnography at a point in time and note with pleasure its contribution to the field once more. Ethnography may be messy, difficult, and at times uncooperative, but its results offer a unique insight into the perspectives of people and organisations that can hide in plain sight. An accessible and compelling read, this Handbook will provide a sound and essential reference source for academics, researchers, students, and practitioners engaged in police and criminal justice studies.

This book focuses on the criminalization trend and process regarding the internal migration in contemporary China from the perspective Law-in-Action. In Chinese society today, internal migrants are commonly perceived as criminals. Crimmigration, a global term that communicated the convergence of the criminal legal system and the immigration enforcement system, manifest itself in China’s hukou-based (also known as the household registration system) criminal legal system. How hukou has been constructed into the concept of Crimmigration in China strikes at the core of the ultimate questions of this book: who is being criminalized, how does the political-economic-cultural institution known as ‘hukou’ shape the criminal justice process, and how has the role of hukou changed over time in the ever-changing process? Drawing on interviews with police, prosecutors, criminal lawyers & judges, prison staff and migrant leaders in Yangtze River Delta, China, this book reflects on a historical development on hukou and its function in social control. Each chapter contributes to an extended analysis of pragmatic aspects of decision-making moments in the criminal justice system. This book will appeal to criminology researchers and students with in interest in law, politics, migration, and citizenship in contemporary China.

This innovative book examines the use of ethnography and fieldwork in Criminology and Criminal Justice Research. Using a combination of case studies, as well as “behind the scenes” contributions, it provides an comprehensive look at both the insights gained from ethnographic research, as well as the choices researchers make in conducting that work. The research is divided into three main sections, covering ethnographies of subcultures, ethnographies of place, and ethnographies of policing. It includes a diverse group of international contributors to provide perspectives on researchers’ selection of questions to study, and their decisions about using ethnography to study those questions. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with a qualitative perspective, as well as related fields such as sociology, anthropology, and demography. It will also be of interest to students studying research methods and design.

This textbook surveys new and emergent methods for doing research in critical security studies, filling a gap in the literature. The second edition has been revised and updated. This textbook is a practical guide to research design in this increasingly established field. Arguing for serious attention to questions of research design and method, the book develops accessible scholarly overviews of key methods used across critical security studies, such as ethnography, discourse analysis, materiality, and corporeal methods. It draws on prominent examples of each method’s objects of analysis, relevant data, and forms of data collection. The book’s defining feature is the collection of diverse accounts of research design from scholars working within each method, each of which is a clear and honest recounting of a specific project’s design and development. This second edition is extensively revised and expanded. Its 33 contributors reflect the sheer diversity of critical security studies today, representing various career stages, scholarly interests, and identities. This book is systematic in its approach to research design but keeps a reflexive and pluralist approach to the question of methods and how they can be used. The second edition has a new forward-looking conclusion examining future research trends and challenges for the field. This book will be essential reading for upper-level students and researchers in the field of critical security studies, and of much interest to students in International Relations and across the social sciences.

The Second Edition of An Introduction to Transitional Justice provides a comprehensive overview of transitional justice judicial and non-judicial measures implemented by societies to redress legacies of massive human rights abuse. Written by some of the leading experts in the field, it takes a broad, interdisciplinary approach to the subject, addressing the dominant transitional justice mechanisms as well as key themes and challenges faced by scholars and practitioners. Using a wide historic and geographic range of case studies to illustrate key concepts and debates, and featuring discussion questions and suggestions for further reading, this is an essential introduction to the subject for students.