#EarlyCareerResearchers and #HCNet’s future by Kate West
A
colleague recently tweeted that ‘The #EarlyCareerResearchers are our future, read them
well and let them lead the way ...’. This was evident
at the first #HCNet meeting. To see such fantastic early career scholarship is
empowering in an academy where so many ECRs labour in positions of precarity.
As a young scholar I sought mentorship from senior colleagues. I once asked one
of my doctoral supervisors if they’d publish with me and they replied that it
would be unfair of them to associate themselves with my research. They were
right. It turns out that rather than looking ‘up’ I ought to simply look
‘across’ to my peers. Rhiannon Pickin and Dan Johnson are the epitome of early
career self-empowerment, working together to empower one another. Their paper
of material culture and the crime museum contributes to ongoing efforts in
criminology to theorise emotion, affect and ethical spectatorship in the crime
museum. Their move away from so-called iconic sites of trauma and suffering
that pepper the canon including Tuol Sleng and Alcatraz is refreshing. Although
these sites are important, Rhiannon and Dan demonstrated the extent of
unethical spectatorship in local museums here in the United Kingdom. Another
highlight was Katherine (Katy) Roscoe’s paper on settler-colonial prison
islands. Katy charted a striking optical regime operating on Cockatoo Island
(incidentally a voyeuristic site of trauma and suffering today) that decenters
a unilateral panoptic (all-seeing) gaze associated with nineteenth century
prisons to one that constituted exchanged glances across the water.
Finally,
and perhaps what has stayed with me the most, was Kate Lister’s moving keynote.
Cultural historians, especially those of emotions, have recently begun to reflect
on the separation between emotion and making history. Kate’s keynote was a
refreshing, feminist reminder that as embodied, feeling researchers we owe a
duty to those we research, not least those who we survive. Nowhere can this be
more applicable than in relation to historical criminology. The future is
bright for historical criminology, an reflexive and ethical one populated by
young, dynamic and thoughtful scholars who are supporting and empowering one
another.
Kate West is Lecturer in Criminology at Oxford Brookes
University. Kate researches visual, material, and aural cultures of crime from
the eighteenth century to the present day. Her first monograph What Was Criminology: An Unlikely Art
History is in preparation.
'Home Fires (where my books wait for me)' by Dayna Bateman via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 |
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