Title:	Doing Ethnography in Criminology
Authors:	Stephen K. Rice Michael D. Maltz
Keywords:	Criminology
Issue Date:	2018
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	It is an enormous and highly undeserved honor to be asked to write a foreword for such a fascinating collection of deeply personal reflections of some of the most accomplished ethnographers working in criminology today. I have to confess that the only reason I was asked to write this foreword is because I declined the invitation to write a proper chapter for the volume myself. I did so, not just out of laziness or lack of time (both of which are undeniable) but out of a sense of (at best) humility and (at worst) a sort of personal shame. That is, this is a book not just about ethnography but about ethnographers. Indeed, if ethnography is the art of walking a mile in another’s shoes, then this remarkable book is a sort of ethnography of ethnographers. Yet, I do not consider myself a proper ethnographer. Of course, I do my share of qualitative and mixed method research, and much of this is field-based and action-oriented. Indeed, like most of the authors in this volume (this is 2018, after all, and the world is falling apart all around us), I have lost interest in desk-based, purely academic chitchat about who has the best theory or scale or dataset. Instead, I try to utilize whatever time and small talents I have in work alongside real-world organizations dealing with real-world problems in these troubled times. Yet, as Mark Fleisher writes in his chapter, this does not make me an ethnographer. You do not get to be an ethnographer just because you attend a lot of board meetings of ex-prisoner charities or consult with justice reform groups or even go into prisons now and again to do interviews with residents and staff, like I do. Ethnography is about deep, sustained immersion into a “field”—walking that mile and then some. At its best (and some of the best examples of the method in criminology have been carried out by the authors of this volume), ethnography can be the richest form of social scientific research.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55238
ISBN:	978-3-319-96316-7
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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