Sensory “Heteroglossia” and Social Control: Sensory Methodology and Method

Herrity, Kate; Schmidt, Bethany E.; Warr, Jason

Abstract

Heteroglossia refers to the presence of multiple voices and views – exchanges that are central to the academic project (Bakhtin, The dialogic imagination: four essays (trans. and ed: Emerson C, Holquist M). University of Texas Press, 1981; Clarke, Critical dialogues: thinking together in turbulent times. Policy Press, 2019). We use this concept in two ways: first, to bring Stanley Cohen’s seminal book Visions of Social Control (1985) into conversation with more recent work in sensory criminology, and second, to demonstrate the ways in which the sensory can itself bring different aspects of experience into dialogue, thereby enriching the research process. We contend that the sensory provides a means of investigating how practices of social control extend far beyond our vision. Contrary to conventional understandings of how we identify, classify and process people defined as criminal – or ‘ways of looking’ – we draw on wider academic literature and empirical examples to illustrate how our broader sensory palate is equally implicated in social ordering. We consider what this does for our assumptions about how we produce knowledge, as well as how we go about altering our research methods to make the sensory both the focus of and the instrument of inquiry. The sensory, we argue, has always formed various modes of understanding which we are unaccustomed to echoing in our research practice. Doing so has profound implications for how we ‘do’ social science.

Citation

Herrity, K., Schmidt, B. E., & Warr, J. (2022). Sensory “Heteroglossia” and Social Control: Sensory Methodology and Method. In M. Dodge, & R. Faria (Eds.), . Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18401-7_8

• Acceptance Date: Sep 1, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Nov 19, 2022
• Publication Date: Nov 19, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jan 27, 2023
• Publisher: Springer International Publishing
• Pages: 125-139
• Series Title: Qualitative Research in Criminology
• ISBN: 9783031184000
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18401-7_8
• Keywords: Sensory criminology, Qualitative methods, Prisons research, Social control, Sensemaking
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/16505248
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-18401-7_8
• Additional Information: © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG