Abstract
Prompted by the need to expand the criminological enterprise, this paper makes a case for a critical criminology of education, one that takes a governance approach. It seeks to illustrate what such a criminology might entail by developing an analytic framework with which to analyze the educational field. The framework is put to use to provide an analytic discussion of Ontario education policy reformations concerning student discipline. Education was conceptualized by policymakers as an institution for disciplining and governing students, specifically through the concept of “bullying”. From this analysis, the paper suggests it is possible to theorize education as a “security apparatus”, one that is increasingly concerned with the governance of social (in)security and public safety. The discussion suggests that education is an important institution for governing by identifying one regulatory project that concerns student behavior both within and beyond the school. In so doing, the paper illustrates the creative process in developing a criminology of education, and the value of imaginative thinking within criminology.
Highlights
The notion of a criminology of education will likely arouse some degree of confusion or doubt among criminologists
A critical criminology of education is the result of an imaginative endeavor, thinking creatively about the discipline itself, and about the literature one employs and the empirical objects one studies
What I have tried to do in this paper is offer an idea of what a critical criminology of education might entail
Summary
The notion of a criminology of education will likely arouse some degree of confusion or doubt among criminologists. There have been some “critical” studies of education within criminology, but this has largely been limited to criminologists interested in educational programs for prisoners and tends to be descriptive and normative (e.g., [5,6]), though this area has been studied for evaluative purposes (e.g., [7,8]) What these works have in common is a narrow conception of what object of study criminology is organized around: namely, the domains of criminal law, punishment, and criminal justice. A critical criminology, following others (see, for example, [10,11]), means taking governance and social ordering as concerns for criminological understanding In this sense, a critical criminology of education is the result of an imaginative endeavor, thinking creatively about the discipline itself, and about the literature one employs and the empirical objects one studies. Ontario educational policy reformations insofar as this demonstrates the capacity for my analytic framework to offer a novel understanding of the educational field
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