Plunging into the belly of the beast

While my thesis primarily focusses upon the embodied experience of inmates who appear in court by video link from prison, I'm also reflecting upon my embodied experience of conducting a prison ethnography – an immersion of my body into a 'hostile' environment for the purposes of gathering evidence and rich verbatim data for my thesis. I argue that places of incarceration are non-neutral, closed finite spaces that create specific phenomenological experiences, spatial relationships and human responses (Bollnow 1963: 18-19) for both inmates appearing remotely in court from prison, and for a researcher visiting to gather evidence.

I question what I, as a researcher, have gained from my physical entry into the opaque carceral world, plunging into “the belly of the beast” (Wacquant 2002: 385-9) and my subsequent process of reflection. Yvonne Jewkes argues that the researcher may be actively reflexive of their personal encounter while still maintaining academic standards of epistemological and theoretical engagement (Jewkes 2012: 72). By interrogating the self and the lived experience of conducting prison research, the reflexive researcher may add humanity to data, animate the dynamics and nuances of the highly charged environment of a prison to more fully articulate and critique the penal system. 

Well, that's what I'm aiming for ...

http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2011/02/west_new_york_police_charge_qu.html

accessed 06/03/13

A friend and PhD candidate, also involved in prison research, has just sent me a link to this recent publication: 

Imprint: Criminologische Studies
Available
€ 25,95
ISBN: 9789057182631
216 pages
Publishing date: 15/02/2013

• Contents
• Google Book Search

THE PAINS OF DOING CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Kristel Beyens, Jenneke Christiaens, Bart Claes, Steven De Ridder, Hanne Tournel, Hilde Tubex

http://www.aspeditions.be/article.aspx?article_id=THEPAI818J&langue=en-gb

According to the link: 

"Handbooks of research mainly focus on research methods and techniques and leave the person of the researcher out of focus. This book explicitly starts from the experiences of criminology researchers and tells about the ‘pains’ they encounter when doing research. By giving voice to the researchers themselves, this book fills a gap that is rarely touched upon in the classical textbooks. These tales of the field bear witness to the often hidden difficulties and pitfalls of doing research and focus on often-neglected questions. What does it mean to do research in a hyper masculine environment such as a prison? What are the challenges to get access to a police organization or to private intelligence organizations and private security companies? How does a researcher cope with her/his own emotions during fieldwork? How does an ex-convict experience the process ofbecoming a researcher? What are the hidden or unexpected problems of publishing? What are the challenges of doing comparative research?

These are only a few questions that are dealt with in this book, which is written by researchers for researchers and students. Although it starts from a criminological perspective, researchers from other disciplines will also benefit from the sharing and comparing of similar experiences.

This book is written by scholars of the Criminology Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. They are all members of the research group Crime and Society (CRiS)."

I'll add this to the ever-growing 'must-read' pile.