Criminal Justice Research in an Era of Mass Mobility

Andriani Fili, Synnøve Jahnsen, Rebecca Powell, Andriani Fili, Synnøve Jahnsen, Rebecca Powell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138284128
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351980074
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

We live in an era of mass mobility where governments remain committed to closing borders, engaging with securitisation discourses and restrictive immigration policies, which in turn nurture xenophobia and racism. It is within this wider context of social and political unrest that the contributors of this collection reflect on their experiences of conducting criminological research. This collection focuses on the challenges of doing research on the intersections between criminal justice and immigration control, choosing and changing methodologies while juggling the disciplinary and interdisciplinary requirements of the work's audience.

From research design, to fieldwork to writing-up, this book captures every part of the research process, drawing on a range of topics such as migration control, immigrant detention and border policing. It also reflects on more neglected areas such as the interpersonal and institutional contexts of research and the ontological and epistemological assumptions embedded within data analysis methods. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the major developments in current research in this field, how and why they occur and with what consequences.

This book seeks to shake off the phantom of undisturbed research settings by bringing to the fore the researchers' involvement in the research process and its products. An interdisciplinary collection, it can be used as a reference not just for those interested in the criminology of mobility but also as a learning tool for anyone conducting research on a highly charged topic in contemporary policy and politics.

Part 1

Producing and presenting knowledge in an era of mass mobility

Chapter 1

Taking the border for a walk

A reflection on the agonies and ecstasies of exploratory research

Leanne Weber

Introduction

Artist Paul Klee famously described drawing as ‘taking a line for a walk’. That phrase suggests spontaneity and exploration, an artistic technique not entirely devoid of judgement or restraint but sufficiently fluid to enable curiosity to lead the way towards the discovery of meaning. I see this concept as a metaphor for the type of exploratory social research I particularly value and to which I am intuitively attracted as a criminological researcher. Although devising explicit hypotheses based on existing theory or previous scholarship and testing them with empirical research is a time-honoured method in social science research, other strands of social inquiry adopt a more open ended and flexible approach.

In this chapter, I use an example of exploratory research in which I am currently engaged to illustrate the key characteristics of this easily misunderstood research genre. I trace the development of a multi-faceted research program ‘Globalisation and the Policing of Internal Borders’,¹ and report some of the challenges encountered in the early stages of implementation of that project. I begin by setting out some key ideas about exploratory research as an epistemological perspective² for social researchers and introduce ‘border as method’ as the particular example of that approach that informed my own research program. I then discuss the design (i.e. the theory and choice of data collection methods) for my study and recount some early fieldwork experiences, pointing out both the advantages and the pitfalls of starting out on an extensive research journey with a deliberately unfinished roadmap.

Epistemology: taking the border for a walk as an example of exploratory research

Stebbins (2001) has argued that exploratory approaches have a unique and valuable place in social research – not merely serving as a preliminary stage within a larger research project but instead offering a distinctive, stand-alone research rationale. He describes exploratory social research as a ‘purposive and systematic undertaking’ aimed at the production of ‘inductively derived generalisations about the group, process, activity, or situation under study’.³ This contrasts with deductive approaches that typically adopt a fixed and narrow theoretical framing from the outset, follow strict methodological rules and set out to test explicit hypotheses. Importantly, Stebbins insists that both exploratory (inductive) research, and predictive (deductive) research are forms of scientific inquiry. In fact, Stebbins notes, new knowledge can never be produced by deduction alone, and this applies to the hard sciences as much as to social science. While inductive research is particularly suitable for under-researched (or poorly researched) subject areas, deductive methods come into their own where an extensive empirical and theoretical literature already exists.

With its focus on the production of generalisations through reflexive processes of empirical observation and induction, exploratory social research is closely aligned with grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Exploratory approaches typically begin with a broad and open-minded examination of a topic, where the premature narrowing of the theoretical gaze is deliberately avoided. Since the primary goal is to develop an intimate understanding of a social process, it follows, according to Stebbins (2001), ‘that the most efficacious approach is to search for this understanding wherever it may be found, using any ethical method that would appear to bear fruit’. Exploratory studies are therefore likely to adopt a mixed-methods approach to data collection, often combining both qualitative and quantitative data (Cresswell, 2011; Yin, 2009, 2012). While advocates of these approaches claim that considerable rigour can be built into mixed-methodology case study design, for example by developing systematic (albeit flexible) data collection protocols, Stebbins argues that exploratory research is driven more by the desire to produce original ideas than to demonstrate methodological perfection. Flaws in design tend to be corrected as they become apparent or in later studies that may arise from the work. While social researchers engaged in deductive empirical research typically emphasise methodology beyond all else, exploratory researchers, according to Stebbins, give equal regard to their role as methodologists, writers and theorists – if anything, with a slight emphasis on the production of theory.

Although I have always been attracted to the blue skies offered by exploratory work, my most recent opportunity to embark on a project of social exploration arose from circumstances beyond my control. Several years ago, I was struggling to develop a proposal for a major national award, the Future Fellowship, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC). After years of research and writing on borders and border control, I was hoping to shift gear a little, to return perhaps to my pre-academic experience in applied policing research and combine it with a long-held desire to contribute to scholarship and activism on Aboriginal justice. The early feedback I received from faculty advisers at my university was not encouraging. The Future Fellowship, they said, placed far more emphasis on individual track record than did other funding schemes. Therefore, I would need to formulate a project that related directly to the topics on which I had already researched and published. Not only that, but moving into research on Indigenous issues was fraught with additional hazards, not the least of which would be establishing legitimacy in the eyes of possible participants and prospective research partners. There seemed to be no option but to beat a hasty retreat to the familiar territory of border research. However, the desire to do something new had taken hold, so I continued to ponder how I could balance these conflicting imperatives. The answer that came to me was to take the border for a walk.

Looking back over more than a decade of research and writing – as major funding applications always require – I realised that I had indeed been taking the border for a walk for quite a while. Once borders are understood not as physical locations but as governmental functions (Weber, 2006) that can be carried out using a variety of technologies (Weber, 2013a) in an expanding range of locations (Weber & Bowling, 2004; Weber, 2007), researching the border becomes an exercise in following the application of border control functions wherever they are performed. This perspective comes readily to critical criminologists who are concerned with relations of power. While some critical criminologists may choose ethnographic methods to challenge power by privileging otherwise silenced voices (see for example Gerard, 2014), others go straight to the heart of power in order to understand and critique it (e.g. Whyte, 2009).

Armed with the epistemological perspective of taking the border for a walk, I revisited an article I had published with Ben Bowling in order to find ideas that would help to structure a project on ‘internal bordering practices’. In that article (Weber & Bowling, 2008), I wrote that borders served the important purpose, inter alia, of delineating boundaries of entitlement, belonging and citizenship. Such bordering practices might be constituted by governmental projects of expulsion from physical territory or might instead create borders through more nuanced processes of social exclusion.

Guided by these three themes, I formulated three case studies. The first one focuses on the ‘structurally embedded border’ that operates through law and divides populations on the basis of differential entitlement to essential services based on immigration status. These borders may be directed towards the production of ‘voluntary’ departures through the creation of unlivable lives but also serve the neo-liberal agenda of reducing public expenditure. The second case study, on the policing of public space, explores the idea that police encounters with the public can produce messages of belonging or non-belonging, depending on the reason for and quality of the encounter. These are borders created through practice, in which the exercise of authority inscribes the line between those who are included or excluded from the community of citizens deemed worthy of respect and protection. The final case study explores the idea of hierarchies of citizenship through an examination of compulsory income management, a policy that falls outside the usual domain of criminology. This policy operates by identifying certain welfare recipients as incapable of managing the responsibilities of neo-liberal citizenship, thereby necessitating state intervention in the management of their financial affairs. In the case of Aboriginal people, who have been explicitly targeted, this appears to revitalise colonial assumptions and practices that pre-dated their formal recognition as citizens.

Surprisingly perhaps – given its unconventional framing – the project was funded. For tactical reasons, the proposal contained no mention of the process of ‘taking the border for a walk’ that had produced it. But writing in this context I am free to acknowledge that it was that exploratory and reflexive process that enabled me to cross both disciplinary and policy boundaries to develop a research programme that hangs together by what some would consider to be the barest of threads – the concept of ‘internal bordering practices’. Taking this circuitous route towards research design allowed me to include some examination of policing practices and of policies that target Aboriginal people – which had been my original intention – while using the language of border control to link the study strongly to my academic history.

Later I discovered that what I had thought of as an audacious sleight of hand aligned remarkably closely with a well-articulated research philosophy within the field of border studies, namely ‘border as method’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have coined this phrase to describe an epistemological approach that treats borders as epistemic viewpoints from which to analyse practices of inclusion and exclusion. Border as method entails:

taking the border not only as research ‘object’ but also as an ‘epistemic’ angle … [which] provides productive insights on the tensions and conflicts that blur the line between inclusion and exclusion, as well as on the profoundly changing code of social inclusion in the present.

(Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, p. viii)

In contrast with ethnography, which starts with lived experience, border as method requires the researcher to follow the logic of the border across ‘diverse borderscapes’ in order to transcend ‘bounded space’ and reach new conceptualisations of bordering practices. This emphasis on the pursuit of wholly new connections between ideas and bodies of knowledge aligns well with the account of exploratory research by Stebbins (2001) I have given already, as does the presentation of ‘border as method’ as an epistemological perspective rather than a fixed research methodology. The border can be conceived as a method because, in Mezzadra and Neilson’s formulation, borders are relational, being concerned with struggles for domination and resistance to power. It is the relational nature of borders that leads analysis to cross both disciplinary and geographic divides to uncover ‘new relations of connectivity across discrete spaces and organisations of data’.

This brings us to another key feature of border as method, that it values the integration and reinterpretation of existing knowledge as much as the collection of new empirical data. Mezzadra and Neilson advocate breadth in research design rather than the depth of inquiry that is favoured in much ethnographic research, for example, saying:

We question the limiting perspective imposed by the view that the breadth of research compromises its depth and rigor. Rather, we proceed with the commitment that breadth can produce depth, or better, can produce a new kind of conceptual depth.

(Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, p. 10)

My discovery of Mezzadra and Neilson’s work provided some legitimation for the broad and open-ended design I had intuitively been drawn to in my project ‘Globalisation and the policing of internal borders’. Both border as method and my own approach of taking the border for a walk are intended to guide an exploratory inquiry aimed at uncovering linkages between what may appear on the surface to be unrelated bordering processes.

Methodology: uncovering the deep structures of internal borders

As set out in the previous section, taking the border for a walk gives rise to a particular orientation to border research that is inter-disciplinary, exploratory and focused on sites of struggle. I chose to collect data for the project through a series of mixed-method case studies, each showcasing a relevant policy area, since case studies are ideally suited for exploratory research because of their flexibility and responsiveness (Thomas, 2011; Thomas & Myers, 2015; Yin, 2009, 2012). Moreover, I elected to undertake not one but three apparently disparate case studies, each reflecting a different site of struggle within the domains of law, policy and practice. This approach could be criticised for pursuing breadth at the expense of depth, as discussed earlier. But in choosing this path I judged that opting for shallow and wide was exactly what was needed to uncover the ‘deep structure’ (Cohen, 2001) that connected the internal bordering practices under study.

The rationale for the research design is that Australia’s internal borders are deeply embedded in everyday practices of service provision (mediated by immigration status), street policing (mediated by race, place and perceptions of belonging) and the administration of welfare (mediated by conceptions of individual desert and capability). Policing, here, is conceived broadly across these different domains to cover any authoritative intervention intended to selectively manage or ‘police’ populations (Neocleous, 2000). Because of this deep embedding, the research program has been conceptualized as an excavation aimed at exposing these submerged processes to critical scrutiny to enable the identification of contrasts and connections. Even in an extended research program, it is not possible to investigate every combination of citizenship status, enforcement modality and geographical context. Therefore, an ‘ice-core sampling’ method was employed to identify the case study topics. Dauvergne (2008, p. 3) explains this technique and its rationale as follows:

To understand the layers, the scientist extracts a narrow sample that contains a trace of each element under examination. This is the antidote to breadth. Core sampling … means drilling into each topic under consideration to extract a sample that in key ways reveals something about the whole.

Case study one examines how the internal border operates as a site of inclusion/exclusion through immigration checks at points of access to essential services. Although life necessities such as employment and housing are crucial for social integration, education and health care were chosen for this part of the study because of their institutional nature. This case study builds on previous research in which I coined the term ‘structurally embedded border’ to represent the deployment of information exchange between service-providing, regulatory and immigration control agencies (Weber, 2013b). Of the three case studies, this one aligns most closely with literal border control, although it takes place away from the physical border. To date, 26 semi-structured interviews have been completed with key informants from the education, health and legal sectors, and plans are now in train to conduct surveys with secondary schools and hospitals aimed at identifying the extent to which their institutions have become locations where the imperatives of border control are played out or resisted.

Case study two explores how perceptions of belonging or not belonging can be produced and reinforced through interactions between young people from visible minorities and people in positions of authority, such as police, transport officials and teachers. Data is being collected through focus groups with culturally and linguistically diverse youths. Participants express what belonging means to them then recount their encounters with authorities in a variety of public places that have reinforced or threatened their sense of belonging. From an initial starting point focused on the ‘policing of public space’, the scope of this case study has broadened somewhat beyond the state police to include interactions with a wider range of actors and authority figures than was originally intended. This has been led by the interests and concerns of the youth organisation that has been an active partner in the project. I plan to make further connections with agencies that support different cohorts of young people, such as community legal centres, in the hope that interactions with state police will come more prominently to the fore....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ introduction
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Criminal justice research in an era of mass mobility: a brief introduction
• Part 1 Producing and presenting knowledge in an era of mass mobility
• Part 2 Epistemological and methodological accounts in practice
• Part 3 The politics of positionality, ethics and emotions
• Index