Thread by @WarrCriminology

Dear #Criminology,
We need to have a serious conversation about #LivedExperience in #Criminology. There's a trend for suggesting that this, in and of itself, confers special insights or even 'expertise' over/above theoretically informed learning. This is not necessarily true. 1/?

First, we need to unpick the assumption underpinning the notion #LivedExperience confers special insight. This is predicated on the idea that experiencing a phenomenon necessarily enables an individual to understand the phenomenon that they experienced. This is false. 2/?

Experience enables people to understand subjectively experiencing the phenomenon but not necessarily the phenomenon itself. Think about cancer. Experiencing cancer doesn't necessarily mean that you will have any sophisticated understanding of malignant cellular metastasis but 3/?

... you will have some understanding of having and living with cancer. Conflating these two forms of understanding leads to erroneous conclusions about the nature and benefits of #LivedExperience in #Criminology. 4/?

Secondly, given the above point, we need to question just what special insights #LivedExperience does enable? I would argue that these special insights are limited to gaps in current understanding or extant literature in #criminology. 5/?

What it cannot do is supply answers to those lacunas of understanding – those can only come from rigorous, theoretically informed, investigation and analysis. Why do I argue such a case? 6/?

The miscomprehension that individuated experience of a phenomenon has any relation to how others experience the same phenomenon. Of course, it may do – but you cannot justify any claim to this without reference to extant theoretical material or new empirical evidence. 7/?

Lastly, there is a problem with #LivedExperience in #criminology that we are sometimes loath to admit: the degree of bias that this can introduce to the research process. 8/?

Bias, and the assumptions which underpin it, can infect and effect the questions we ask, the way we design our studies, the manner in which we gather our data, the decisions we make in our analysis, the way we interpret and write up that analysis (see onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…) 9/?

Bias can (and does) affect everything we do. #LivedExperience necessarily imposes biases upon us – my decade or so in prison and negative experiences of the #CriminalJusticeSystem has left me scarred with bias. 10/?

However, as criminologists we need to be rigorous (reflexive?) in accounting for and mitigating that bias.

I fear that with this nascent and overt, and sometimes unthinking, privileging of #LivedExperience in #criminology we forget that. 11/11.