The Public Would Rather Watch Hockey! The Promises and Institutional Challenges of ‘Doing’ Public Criminology within the Academy
Abstract
While there has been growing academic dialogue concerning the need for, and value of, public criminology there has been little beyond theorizing and hypothesizing as to how one could actually ‘do’ public criminology. With this in mind, we set out to address this gap by implementing a departmental initiative that brought students into a for-credit course that was also open to the general public. This paper focuses on this enterprise and examines the promises and subsequent challenges of ‘doing’ public criminology within the academy. We deconstruct the academic and institutional shift toward ‘public’ engagement and intellectualism to better understand the “science-politics nexus†operating in criminology. We begin with a discussion of the present debates concerning public criminology and follow with a description of our public criminology colloquium series. We then discuss the promises and challenges we faced in the implementation of the colloquium and conclude by reflecting on how these personal challenges are representative of the broader institutional and organizational challenges facing public criminology.
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