Abstract
Emerging from critical conferences in the early 1970s involving academic researchers, community-based workers and activists, critical social research challenged the role and legitimacy of mainstream social sciences in their support of social orders fractured by class, ‘race’, sectarianism, gender, sexuality and age. This article opens with a brief reflection on the emergence and consolidation of critical social theory as the foundation and context for research that challenges state-institutionalised power and authority. It draws on long-term, in-depth primary research into the operational policies and practices of policing and incarceration, exploring the profound challenges involved in bearing witness to the ‘pain of others’. Recounting personal testimonies ‘from below’, revealing institutionalised deceit and pursuing ‘truth recovery’, it argues that dissenting voices are the foundation of hope, resistance and transformation.
Highlights
Phil Scraton: Fractured Lives, Dissenting Voices, Recovering ‘Truth’: Frontiers of Research and Resistance. In his classic text Ways of Seeing, the artist John Berger encouraged wide public debate about how selectivity afforded to images ‘establish our place in the surrounding world’
Impulsive, the immediacy and spontaneity of observation are informed by prior knowledge and understanding
Situating herself in the presence of those ordeals, photographing and reporting the deprivations endured by civilians caught in the crossfire, Sontag introduced an international audience to a ‘way of seeing’ that otherwise would have remained invisible
Summary
In his classic text Ways of Seeing, the artist John Berger encouraged wide public debate about how selectivity afforded to images ‘establish our place in the surrounding world’. The UK Government used criminal justice agencies to stifle dissent from within Black communities, trades unions, young people and politically affiliated prisoners in the North of Ireland.
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