The sounds of criminal justice

Panel wise abstracts/bios

1. Digital Epistemologies in Socially Distanced Times: Exploring Knowledge Production through Qualitative WhatsApp Surveys (Dr Leila Ullrich)

You can view the recording of this presentation below. Please note, the BSL interpretation of this event was recorded during a live interaction, and may contain errors due to the nature of the content, and/or speakers being unknown to participants. The intention is always to provide a true and accurate interpretation and is tailored purely to the needs of the people present. Please bear this in mind when watching the recorded version.

Click here to download Dr Leila Ullrich's presentation slides

‘The answer to your question is too obvious, and you know it more than we do’, a Syrian refugee told us indignantly. His was a response to a qualitative WhatsApp survey I developed in 2017 – the first of its kind – to improve UNDP’s understanding of the relationships between Syrian refugees and their host communities in Lebanon. This research experiment was a success with 1300 people participating. I was struck by how comfortable our respondents were with digital distance. Their messages were peculiarly intimate, deeply reflective but also expressed doubts about the purpose of our survey. They inspired me to ask further questions: how do digital methods change the knowledge created and how do they mediate the relationship with vulnerable research participants? Can important knowledge be created precisely because we are not present in the field? What can we learn from the soundscape of WhatsApp voice messages? In answering these questions, my starting point are the epistemic struggles that lurked in my WhatsApp survey as Syrian refugees challenged not only the survey’s disciplinary frameworks (e.g., development, refugee law, criminal justice) but also global knowledge production in general. The paper will situate the analysis at the intersection between the ‘digital methods turn’ propelled by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the current drive to decolonise research methods, and ask what, if anything, qualitative WhatsApp surveying can contribute.

Bio: Dr Leila Ullrich is a lecturer in law at Queen Mary University of London, where she also holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research interests lie in the sociology and gender logics of international criminal law and counter-terrorism. In 2017, she received her PhD in Criminology at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, which explored the discourse and use of ‘justice for victims’ and ‘gender justice’ at the International Criminal Court. She is currently writing up her monograph for publication with Oxford University Press. Before starting her postdoctoral research, Leila worked as social stability analyst at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Lebanon. In this capacity she conceptualized, secured funding for and managed an Innovation Project ‘Speak your Mind’, a qualitative WhatsApp survey of Syrian refugees and Lebanese host communities to better understand local conflict dynamics and needs. She was also the Convenor of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) network and worked for the International Criminal Court. 

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2. Listening to Power in Prison (Dr Kate Herrity)

You can view the recording of this presentation below. Please note, the BSL interpretation of this event was recorded during a live interaction, and may contain errors due to the nature of the content, and/or speakers being unknown to participants. The intention is always to provide a true and accurate interpretation and is tailored purely to the needs of the people present. Please bear this in mind when watching the recorded version.

Click here to download Dr Kate Herrity's presentation slides

This talk will draw from my doctoral research, which centred around an aural ethnography of a local men’s prison, as well as from contributions to  our co-edited volume on “sensory penalties”. I will discuss what foregrounding sound as a theoretical lens in prisons research – and arguably far beyond – does for how we understand the operations of power in prison, and by extension how this understanding affects our conceptions of order. I will briefly outline the project before going on to consider what sound tells us about the prison social world, and discuss the potential for this to shift our understanding of how power operates – both within the prison community, and in terms of our own orientation to our research fields. I will then propose how a focus on sound – and the sensory – can shift our understanding of that most vexatious of prison problems: order.

Bio: Dr Kate Herrity completed her PhD at Leicester in 2019, before leading a module at DeMontfort University. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Junior Research Fellow in Punishment at King’s College, Cambridge, where she hopes to extend her doctoral research to explore what sound reveals about social emotion amongst different prison populations. She has a particular interest in worrying at the margins between criminology and other disciplines, and curates www.sensorycriminology.com which accompanies “Sensory penalities”, co-edited with Bethany Schmidt and Jason Warr and released in 2020. She is currently finishing a monograph of her thesis; “Rhythms and Routines”. 

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3. Sensory deprivation: Is Sound Enough? A Reflection on the Potential and Limitations of Remote Research/ Researching from a Distance (Dr Mark Brown)

You can view the recording of this presentation below. Please note, the BSL interpretation of this event was recorded during a live interaction, and may contain errors due to the nature of the content, and/or speakers being unknown to participants. The intention is always to provide a true and accurate interpretation and is tailored purely to the needs of the people present. Please bear this in mind when watching the recorded version.

Click here to download Dr Mark Brown's presentation slides

Dovetailing with Leila Ullrich’s reflections on the use of Whatsapp as a specific research tool, I consider here the possibilities and pitfalls of voice technologies for researching at a distance. I base this presentation on a large programme evaluation undertaken entirely remotely through the heart of the Covid pandemic by four researchers, including myself, as we explored crime prevention and criminal justice programming in eight countries in west and central Asia. Our research design relied heavily on ordinary voice calls (variously, through platforms such as Skype, Teams, Whatsapp), but included also methods such as ‘listening’ exercises (such as listening to participants’ team meetings). Since research participants were also separated from the researchers not only by distance but also by culture and language, two other key techniques were important. First, we utilised in-country national evaluators who, among other things, provided language translation into and out of Urdu, Pashtun, Dari, Farsi, Russian and a variety of local languages of central Asia, such as Uzbek. Second, these members of the team proved crucial to our listening, by unpacking a great deal of cultural and linguistic context to support our understanding. Important research techniques such as triangulation had to be reimagined in aural terms. The experience points to the many advantages of voice and listening as a primary methodology, but also the significant difficulties that remote-only research presented, a number of which will be discussed.

Bio: Dr Mark Brown is Director of the Centre for Criminological Research in the School of Law at University of Sheffield. He has a background in research on prisons and punishment, risk and dangerous offenders, colonial penal history, postcolonial penalities and more recently in the nascent formation of southern criminology. He is currently an advisor to the UN on prisons and penal reform and has undertaken evaluations of the UN Office in Vienna and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. 

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Event chair

Dr Lindsey Rice is a Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Law, University of Sheffield. She is a mixed methods researcher with expertise in policing, vulnerabilities, the digitisation of policing and virtual courts research. Lindsey graduated from the University of Sheffield with a PhD in 2016 and her research explored the role/s being played by non-warranted civilian investigators relative to that of warranted police detectives within police Criminal Investigation Departments across England and Wales. Her PhD was funded by the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC), and findings from her research have been used to provide evidence-based recommendations pertinent to the recruitment, training and development of Civilian Investigators (CIs) nationally.