Prof Coretta Phillips

This course is available on the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice Policy, MSc in International Social and Public Policy, MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Development), MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Education), MSc in International Social and Public Policy (LSE and Fudan), MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Migration), MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Non-Governmental Organisations) and MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Research). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

There are no pre-requisites as such for this course, but a prior familiarity with social science traditions that foreground lived experiences — such as ethno-methodologies, standpoint epistemologies, or analyses of subjectivity, for instance — can be helpful.

This course introduces students to the flourishing criminological sub-field of research about lived experiences of harm, violence and control. This sub-field extends early criminological interests in how people make sense of what they do, and of what is being done to them, to understand criminal justice. The course is therefore self-consciously 'bottom-up' and in its approach and orientation: substantively, the curriculum emphasises phenomenological understandings of harm and violence's construction, and of formal and informal control's role in criminal justice policy. Methodologically, the course draws on a mix of qualitative, critical, and decolonial methods.

An indicative lecture outline appears below:

1. What is 'lived experience'? Why does it matter?: The opening lecture of the course introduces the course's main themes and epistemological approach. It provides an introductory overview of standpoint epistemologies and decolonial frames, and canvasses emergent thinking and practice across welfare and penal sectors.
2. Theories of harm & violence: The second lecture introduces the main frameworks for understanding harm and violence that will prevail throughout the first half of the course, from Benjamin to Sartre and Fanon to Mbembe, and up to and including contemporary advances in zemiology.
3. Interpersonal harm & violence: The first in a substantive trio of lectures on harm and violence concentrate on the problem at an individual-level. Main concepts include the lived experience of trauma and affect.
4. Group-based harm & violence: The second lecture in the substantive trio on harm and violence imagines the problem at a group level, such as the lived experience of hate, discrimination and prejudice.
5. Systemic & structural harm & violence: The third lecture in the opening trio on harm and violence imagines the problem at a systemic level, such as memory and institutionalised denial, and historical legacies of colonialism and dispossession.
6. Reading Week: No lecture or seminar
7. Theories of control: The second half of the course introduces the main frameworks for understanding control that will prevail throughout the remainder of the course, up to and including contemporary advances in criminology.
8. Object(ion)s of Control: The first substantive lecture on control begins with the lived experiences of being policed, or processed in court, or governed in a custodial facility. The lecture then complicates those designations by reviewing accompanying critiques of 'objectification' in social policy research. Main concepts include the lived experience of 'resilience and vulnerability', alongside more modern scholarship on agency, struggle, and resistance.
9. Subject(ion)s of Control: The second substantive lecture on control then turns to the lived experiences of applying formal control, including ethnographies of policing and prison governance. Main concepts include the lived experience of wielding power.
10. Systems of Control: The final substantive lecture critiques the study of control as referring to something done by one unto another. The lecture instead introduces approaches that problematise control as systemic, productive and ever-present. Main concepts include the lived experience of discipline.
11. Wrapping up the course: The concluding lecture synthesises the course themes and prepares students for the summative assessment.

15 hours of seminars and 15 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

Benjamin, W. (2021). Toward the critique of violence: A critical edition. Stanford University Press.

Bucerius, S. M., Haggerty, K. D., & Berardi, L. (Eds.). (2022). The Oxford Handbook of Ethnographies of Crime and Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press.

Earle, R. (2016). Convict criminology: Inside and out. Policy Press.

Ewick, P., & Silbey, S. S. (1998). The common place of law: Stories from everyday life. University of Chicago Press.

Fanon, F. (1961). Wretched of the Earth. Paris, France: François Maspero.

Ferrell, J., Hayward, K., & Young, J. (2008). Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. London: SAGE.

Guha, R. (1999). Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India. Duke University Press.

Herrity, K., Schmidt, B. E., & Warr, J. (Eds.). (2021). Sensory penalities: Exploring the senses in spaces of punishment and social control. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Jones, N. (2018). The chosen ones: Black men and the politics of redemption. Univ of California Press.

Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books.

Mahmood, S. (2011). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Miller, R. J. (2021). Halfway home: Race, punishment, and the afterlife of mass incarceration. Little, Brown.

Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. Yale University Press.

Seckinelgin, H. (2024). The Armenian genocide and Turkey: Public memory and institutionalized denial. London: Bloomsbury.

Willis, R. (2023). A precarious life: community and conflict in a deindustrialized town. Oxford University Press.

Project (100%, 4000 words).

The assessment will comprise

• A 4,000-word observation and analysis project that explores the course themes. In consultation with the instructor, students will develop a project that involves observing how people make sense of penality. It is stressed that strong performance on the assessment can rest on an observation of harm, violence or control in an everyday context; the emphasis is on lived experience and sense-making.