Carceral geographers may be interested to submit papers for the inaugural issue of the new free open-access journal Criminological Encounters,  a new international, interdisciplinary and open-access journal that aims to facilitate critical dialogues between scholars of criminology and interlocutors in other social, academic, and professional domains about contemporary issues of crime, harm, violence, in/justice, security, law, and society.

The editors have published the following invitation for submissions for Issue 1: “Introducing Criminological Encounters”

“Criminology is famously described as a rendezvous discipline: a meeting place for the established disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, as well as the exact and natural sciences. At the same time criminology can be considered as a self-established, standalone discipline with transdiciplinary origins. The underdetermined character of criminology in these times of heightened sensitivities to issues of crime and in/security makes it a challenging but also exciting field of study. This journal understands criminology as a discipline of encounters: encounters both in the sense of constructive dialogues as well as confrontations around given subjects. These confrontations are at times intellectual in nature, and at others are more explicitly political. This journal also considers criminology as not only the science for the study and understanding of crime and its causes and consequences but also as a discipline that is dedicated to research on conflicts and other social issues from a holistic perspective.

Forthcoming issues within Criminological Encounters will focus on thematic topics and feature competing and complimentary perspectives around these themes. This could be, for example, an encounter between criminologists and sociologists, or between health scholars and nutritionists on the topic of “food in prison”. It could be an encounter between criminologists and urban sociologists, geographers and urban studies scholars on topics like “conflict in public spaces”, “border control and crimmigration”, “electronic monitoring”, “youth delinquency”, and so on.

The journal is, however, not limited to interdisciplinary dialogues but also includes debates between scientists and practitioners (e.g. criminology scholars and law enforcement agents), between criminologists from the “Global North” and criminologists from the “Global South”, or between different criminological methodologies (e.g. qualitative versus quantitative) and theoretical schools of thought (e.g. Foucauldian versus Marxist). Many different encounters are thus possible.”

While the issues of this journal will focus on thematic topics, its very first issue, scheduled for publication in fall 2016, will take its title “Criminological Encounters” as the subject of scrutiny.  Both theoretical reflections and empirical contributions that are in line with, but not limited to, the following themes, will be welcome:

• The dialogues between criminology and given disciplines: e.g. criminology and geography, criminology and law, criminology and political science, criminology and philosophy;
• The dialogues between criminology scholars and practitioners: e.g. criminology and law enforcement agents, criminology and policy makers;
• The encounter between competing research methods: e.g. qualitative versus quantitative approaches in criminology;
• The encounter between competing theories or between different schools of thought: e.g. critical versus positivistic criminology; American versus European criminology; criminology from the “Global South” and criminology from the “Global North”;
• The essence of criminology as a standalone discipline amid its different multidisciplinary influences;
• Criminology as the science for the studies of conflicts;
•  “Criminological encounters”: authors are invited to present other possibilities of interpretation of such encounters;

The editors appeal to authors from different disciplinary backgrounds who – given their research subjects – are seeking a dialogue with criminology. These encounters between different intellectual school of thoughts and competing paradigms set the stage for intra- or interdisciplinary dialogues about an array of topics. And it is exactly these conversations that we set out to present in this journal.

Submission

Submissions in English of a minimum of 6,000 and a  maximum of 9,000 words (notes and bibliographic references included) should be sent before May 22nd, 2016 through the online submission link. All articles will pass a double blind review process and authors can expect feedback on their submission within 3 months. The journal will not charge any submission fee.