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Article Excerpt
Le present commentaire renvoie a un article que les auteurs ont publie en 1999 dans la Revue et ou ils ont emis plusieurs observations sur l'etat de la criminologie telle qu'elle se pratiquait au tournant du 21e siecle dans les universites canadiennes. Ils presentent un survol des tendances qui se sont manifestees au cours des six dernieres annees et qui ont renforce la polarisation des differentes ecoles de pensee en criminologie ainsi que la renaissance des paradigmes classiques de la repression etatique de la criminalite et du maintien de l'ordre public (meme s'ils sont loges sous des bannieres dites novatrices telles que la gestion du risque, la criminologie computationnelle, la criminologie administrative et la cartographie de la criminalite). Alors que des projets de recherche novateurs, progressistes et anti-hegemoniques poursuivent leur essor dans plusieurs milieux, les structures de reconnaissance et de remuneration des administrations universitaires et des milieux de recherche en criminologie militent massivement, et de plus en plus, en faveur de la > (re-)emergente.
Introduction
We last contributed an opinion piece to this journal in a special millennium issue, edited by Christopher Murphy and Philip Stenning, on Criminology Research in Canada (1999). In that earlier article, entitled "Discipline in Dissent: Canadian Academic Criminology at the Millennium" (Menzies and Chunn 1999), we pondered some of the dilemmas facing progressive criminologists in this country, in the wake of a 20-year-long cycle of disciplinary ascendancy that had commenced in the early 1980s and was culminating in yet another wave of conventional criminal justice research programming, institution building, funding initiatives, and curriculum development as the old century drew to a close.
As we observed these trends from our privileged (and comparatively safe and secure) professorial vantage points, and writing in the context of a pre-dot.com-crash, pre-9/11, pre-Iraq-invasion world, our musings on the future prospects of critical criminology and socio-legal studies in Canada were decidedly ambivalent and, in retrospect, less than fully prescient. While noting the troubling resurgence of criminal-justice and crime-prevention paradigms and the attendant potential for critical, feminist, and other dissenting voices to become more and more marginalized and muted in academic criminology sites around the country and the planet, we rather optimistically (and perhaps naively) maintained that the dialectic between orthodox and transgressive strains of the discipline was still very much in play, and its outcome thoroughly in doubt.
Its leviathan-like features notwithstanding, the "new, old criminology," it seemed to us at the time, also showed many signs of foundering under the weight of assorted external constraints and inherent contradictions of its own making. Moreover, despite the assorted unfriendly forces remorselessly bearing down on it, a vibrant critical consciousness continued to express itself within Canadian criminology circles, and a productive and potentially groundbreaking new generation of scholars was fast taking up the cause. "For the record," we concluded, "the two of us are not prepared quite yet to join Sumner (1994) as obituarians to the field, nor to side with Foucault (1977) and Smart (1989; 1990) in dismissing criminology's emancipatory and transformative potential" (Menzies and Chunn 1999: 293-294).
Six years on, our respective appraisals of the discipline, and of its prospects for surviving as a bastion of critical thinking and praxis about crime, law, human justice, and social order, are admittedly less hopeful. Much has changed for Canadian criminology since Y2K clicked over. And most of this change has been in line with a broader transformative impetus, in the academy and beyond, in the direction of an "authoritarian" liberal state (Denis 1995) that is based on a marriage of neo-conservative and neo-liberal approaches to governance: divestment of state social provision, ascendancy of the "new" right, corporatization, commercialization, responsibilization, USAmericanization, commodification, risk management, self-management, and the politics of fear, backlash, and exclusion, to name a few. Given its long-standing, if often conflictual, alignment with state programs of social order and discipline of the citizenry, it is not at all surprising that academic criminology should have experienced these developments with such abiding intensity. Six years into the new millennium, the roots of criminology are once more showing. And the "liberal boot" described by R.S. Ratner more than two decades ago (1984) has more and more assumed an eerily familiar shade of blue.
Of course, the retrenchment of academic criminology in Canada and elsewhere has been unfolding, too, within the wider historical context of profoundly shifting relations between the university, the marketplace, and the state. Since the 1980s, many observers have been documenting, and lamenting, how the status of the university as a semi-autonomous site of scholarly innovation, citizenship education, and critical dialogue has become increasingly undermined by its commercialization as a "liberalized" fountainhead of economic more than intellectual capital. Variously depicted as the "moral collapse of the university" (Wilshire 1990), the "McDonaldization of higher education" (Hayes and Wynyard 2002), and the sell-off of universities (Tudiver 1999), these trends are reverberating throughout the academy and, according to many, are draining the post-secondary institution of its ability to survive the twenty-first century as a site of independent thinking and critical engagement.
Consistent with George Ritzer's (1993) depiction of a contemporary politico-economic and cultural realm ever more dominated by the...
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