Text of the speech given by Editor-in-Chief of the BJC Professor Eamonn Carrabine, at our annual event Echoes of Tomorrow, on 24 June.
The Radzinowicz Memorial Prize is awarded by The British Journal of Criminology for the article published each year, which, in the opinion of the editors, most contributes to the knowledge of criminology and criminal justice issues.
The work for the prize involves each of us independently reading all the articles published for the year, from which we each shortlist 3 articles. Every article that receives two or more nominations is then put on a shortlist, which we then rank order into our first, second and third choices, from which we arrive at a winner. The criteria for the prize are the originality of contribution and elegance of exposition
Every year we say how difficult it is to choose, since there is such good work appearing in the journal, and often you are comparing apples and oranges, but in drawing a distinction between the very good and the great – which is our role as judges awarding the prize – the eventual winner will have all the hallmarks of outstanding scholarship, tackling urgent questions with verve and imagination.
And this year’s winner is no exception, Michael, Theo and Travis’s article ‘Ghost Criminology: A Framework for the Discipline’s Spectral Turn’ is a major achievement, insisting that the present is not so solid as we might think. As I’m sure they will explain in a moment, ghost criminology is best understood as a conceptual metaphor allowing us to examine disruptive forces and ultimately it is concerned with the politics of appearance and disappearance.
One reason why criminologists have begun to deploy spectral metaphors in their writing is, I suspect, because they provide provocative ways of drawing attention to issues of invisibility, marginality and exclusion, as well as the processes of forgetting, repressing and denial that feature in our subject matter. Their paper builds on the spectral turn that criminology has already been taking, while looking back to those turns that have occurred across other disciplines, such as history, literary criticism, philosophy and sociology, to provide a framework for future possible trajectories.
