Qualitative Inquiry

In her recent article on autoethnography and emotion in prison research, Jewkes suggests that “most prison studies remain surprisingly ungendered texts,” and that—on the whole—the scholars who have written about the emotional dimensions of prison research have been women. This article explores both of these claims. First, it draws attention to areas of prison research in which male researchers have been relatively reflexive about matters of emotion and masculinity, while also highlighting the way that some of the emotional dimensions of prison research can be identified even within the classic studies of prison sociology. Second, it suggests that one of the most striking omissions from most studies of men’s imprisonment is the analysis of “homosocial relations” between men—relations defined by flows of masculine intimacy that are submerged or expressed indirectly. Third, it describes some of the author’s experiences as a man undertaking research with imprisoned men, highlighting the degree to which entwined discourses of masculinity and class shaped the research process.

Despite the central importance of ethnographic methods to sociological understandings of imprisonment, ethnographies of prison life have tended to evade ideas of “connectedness” between researcher and participant. This arguably underplays the epistemological possibilities of the unique characteristic of participant observation: the presence of the embodied, subjectively perceiving researcher in the field. Using data from English women’s prisons, this article argues that attending to the (inter)subjective dimensions of ethnographic research can bring gains in sociological understanding. The analysis considers moments of disruption in field research, exploring themes of emotion, identity, and power. It focuses particularly on experiences of being positioned and misplaced by prisoners and prison staff, and of negotiating a researcher identity as a gay woman in a field in which sexuality is a pervasive theme. It is suggested that making the self visible in the text offers both substantive insights and a response to some of the dilemmas generated by even marginal participation in a complex field like a prison.

This article examines the relationships between prison structure, researcher access to prisons, and scholarship about prisons. Drawing on the author’s own work over more than 10 years as a prison educator, legal advocate, and prison researcher, as well as on the scholarship of other prison researchers throughout the social sciences, the article argues that prisons resist scrutiny at two stages. First, prisons are structurally and bureaucratically closed off from research; second, prison researchers are emotionally disconnected from their work. These two layers of obfuscation maintain the prison as a social “black site”: physically located outside of our communities, invisible to the public and the researcher alike. In an effort to overcome these barriers, this article outlines a mixed method, collaborative approach to prison research and discusses the ethical and emotional challenges of this approach. By identifying the major obstacles to meaningful prison research, as well as some possible strategies to overcoming these obstacles, this article seeks to make such work more feasible for investigators in many disciplines.

Prison ethnographers in the United Kingdom have offered rich and diverse accounts of penal interiors, and prisoners’ views and experiences have been, for the most part, reported with sensitivity, creativity, and insight. In the midst of this relatively flourishing qualitative research activity, the actual voices prisoners, and of ex-prisoners who are now prison researchers, have been relatively subdued, although there are signs that this may be about to change. In this article, I explore some of the potentials, possibilities, and problems afforded by insider research—that is, research that draws on direct experience of penal confinement—and explore whether, and how, “spending time” is different from “serving time.” As opportunities to “do prison research differently” emerge, I critically examine some of the epistemological claims and potentials of insider research, its relations to ethnography, and the relevance of advocacy groups, such as Convict Criminology.

A perspective that has often been absent in criminal justice research is that of former prisoners. This article discusses the establishment, in 1997, of “convict criminology,” a group of scholars producing research informed by their experiences of crime and the criminal justice process; that is, either those who have served time themselves or who have operated alongside prisoners as professionals in custodial settings. It is argued that such scholars face similar dilemmas to others in terms of emotionalism, but suggests that their emotions are of a different nature. While an “insider” perspective cannot lay claim to scientific “objectivity,” the article argues that the existence of emotion does not invalidate an “insider” criminologist’s views. Rather, the passion engendered by the experience of incarceration can add color, context, and contour to data collection, findings, and analysis and may therefore be regarded as an essential thread in the tapestry of criminological inquiry.

In this article, we reflect on the position of researcher-as-facilitator of prisoner ethnography. By privileging the standpoint and the voice of prisoners as a way of knowing about carceral spaces, we differentiate between the position of researcher-as-facilitator of prisoner ethnography and other approaches to ethnography in prisons. Based on our editorial work with the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons—a peer-reviewed and academically-oriented journal printed by a university press, featuring articles authored or co-authored by current and former prisoners—we discuss the process, possibilities, and constraints of this form of prison research.

Storytelling is central to human understanding and knowledge. Through listening, reflecting, and retelling a story, new discoveries can be made and an unconcealment, of something that would otherwise remain hidden, occurs. This article uses my experience of undertaking life story research with male ex-prisoners to explore a number of issues raised by Jewkes in her article on doing prison research differently. I suggest that concerns about research “contamination” impact how we do research and how we respond to the emotional experience of doing ethnographic research in criminology. The first potentially restricts modes of analysis, such as intertextual readings of interviews, while the second may prevent a more humanistic relationship between researcher and participant developing. Contamination, rather than something that we connect with polluting, spoiling, or dirtying, should be embraced as offering the potential for revealing new knowledge and ways of doing research differently.

This article reflects on my own experiences as a prison researcher and my position within the cultural web of the prison society. From the first minute of the first day of fieldwork, I entered into perpetual negotiations about my position in the prison and my proper place in the ever-present struggle between (various factions of) prisoners and officers. Entering a prison as a researcher is both scary and exciting. How would I be greeted? Would I be accepted? Where would I fit in? What is the correct degree of closeness and distance between a researcher and the researched in such an environment? How can one best relate to and balance the very different positions that are being ascribed to you, such as “suspicious stranger,” “responsible professional,” “unwanted intruder,” and “trusted confidant”? With excerpts from my fieldnotes, I reveal my own thoughts and feelings about entering the prison for the first time, struggling to fit in and, finally, settling in to the field while remaining alert to the potential minefields surrounding me. I also describe my responses to the performative expectations of masculinity that made me “legible” and to some extent “legitimate” in the eyes of prisoners and prison staff.

In this article, I reflect on the articles in this issue and on my own experiences of doing qualitative prisons research differently. Two of the most serious challenges faced by researchers “at the deep end” are the emotional demands and the threats to integrity encountered when methods or findings are regarded as “suspect.” These challenges are worth the struggle. The collective aim of prison scholarship is to make the prison world “intelligible,” to make “moral blindness” less likely or possible. Rich description is akin to actual experience and as such amplifies life, and enlarges sympathies, in ways that can “reshape human consciousness and with it the structure of society.” Research is reform, or it can be, as we strive to reconceptualize, or articulate, the strange and painful world that is the prison.

This is an autoethnographic 3D writing onto-story about encounters with Roma and begging. It is about the potentiality of virtuality, but sometimes my body rises up into my language. It is intense, intimidating, and sometimes unpleasant. Concepts are methods are problems, but for a language of inquiry, the concepts of Roma, Race, and I are not discriminating enough.

Contributing to a “social studies of interview studies,” this article addresses the treatment of “failed” autobiographic interviews. Taking a discursive constructionist approach, the author re-examines a problematic second language (L2) English interview with an immigrant man from Cambodia. Analysis focuses on the interactional management of (mis)alignment and how it contributed to the shape and outcome of the activity. By turning away from failure to accomplishment, and attending to the ways in which interviewee and interviewer use their differential linguistic and cultural expertise as topic and resource, the multi-layered activity takes on a new light that allows recognition of what was understood, shared, and ultimately achieved. The application of these insights for interview practice and analysis are discussed.

Working with the principles of poetic transcription and creative representation, this hybrid poem was constructed as a creative data set for my doctoral research into women’s experiences of the continuum of men’s intrusive practices in public space (commonly termed street harassment). Inspired by the works of poets/researchers, including Corrine Glesne, Monica Prendergast, and Rosemary Reilly, the poem is constructed solely from the words of 50 female participants. Sentences are taken directly as spoken within the research interviews, with every individual intrusive practice from men reported by participants interlaced with each mention made by women of their habitual embodied responses. It was designed to enable a method of data preparation retaining the phenomenological, the experiential, and evocative nature of women’s accounts while contrasting women’s responses against the particularity of individual men’s intrusive practices.

As part of a larger study examining transformative learning in an educational program for incarcerated women, this article is an ethnodramatic representation of one participant’s life history. Analyzed through a critical lens, using a holistic-content narrative analysis method, Jasmine’s story illuminates the cultural, social, personal, and legal systems of oppression that she survived and that contributed to her path to incarceration. Re-presenting her story in her words through performative text allows Jasmine to invite the audience into her world—forcing us to critically examine our definitions of criminal behavior, our perceptions of culpability, and our use of a penal system to “rehabilitate” women whose life experiences and struggles mirror hers.

In this article, the authors describe and inquire into an interdisciplinary, funded, practice-based research project that investigated the experience of loss following the death of someone close. The research took place during 2010-2012 and involved several layers of investigation: facilitating workshops that combined dance movement psychotherapy and writing; creating a screendance; and interviewing participants and each other. Drawing, in particular, on the “new empiricist” theory of Karen Barad and others, and Rosi Braidotti’s call for “bodily materialism,” the authors focus on the material-discursive “entanglement” of the process of witnessing: how witnessing, throughout, within, and between the multiple aspects of a complex and affecting project, enacted a socially and ethically engaged scholarship.