From the Editors: Academic Writing in an Age of Urgency

Abstract

The only thing more nerve-wracking than becoming the new editors of a journal is to become new editors of a journal that enjoys both good health and reputation.

The Howard Journal was first published in 1921, and it has been in regular publication since 1951. This journal proudly bears the name of John Howard, a pioneer of penal reform who was interested in the prison systems across the United Kingdom but also further afield. While retaining that inherited commitment to justice, curiosity and an international outlook, under Ian Loader's stewardship, this journal was relaunched in 2016 as The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice—intentionally signalling ‘its broader remit and ambition’. Without question, Ian transformed this journal into a serious scholarly periodical for researchers, academics and practitioners interested in reading and contributing to the considered analysis of harm, security and justice.

We know that we will have succeeded if The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice remains just that. However, it was more than the custodian's instinct that enticed us when we saw the call for new editors last year. The role appealed to us because we believe that the topics criminology attends to—crime and justice, social order and control, prisons and prevention, inequality and exclusion—are among the most urgent and vexed matters of social and political life today. When properly supported, the best academic writing1 creates space for careful argument, evidence and theoretical reflection; it can clarify complexity and suggest new ways of thinking about those problems that seem evermore entrenched and intractable. In addition, in our turbulent times, perhaps we need that kind of writing about injustice now more than ever.

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In political communication, ‘the message’, that quotable, takeaway line, has always been paramount. Therefore, there is no novelty in the political commitment to minimalism and reduction. However, with today's populist surge and technological revolution, we are arguably experiencing a cultural slide away from the written towards the visual. The richness of an extended argument is losing favour to the ingratiating video, the whizz-bang style of TikTok and the bitesized, bullet-pointed nuggets of ChatGPT.

We see this conversion in our students' changing relationship with reading lists and study materials. It is not simply that there has been a degeneration of students' attention and willingness to read (the common lament), however. That seems to us to be symptomatic of a broader capitulation to the idea that knowledge should be presented and consumed in simplified modes, visual and immediate, which do not bore and certainly do not challenge.

There is undoubtedly something appealingly democratic in this shift: everyone can, and is encouraged to, express themselves in the spectacle of everyday life (or in our current context, the content economy). However, as Walter Benjamin (1968) once described the pomp and aesthetics of populism in 1930s Europe, the seduction and heady satisfaction of this kind of engagement is sometimes at the expense of developing the tools necessary to critically examine the reconfiguring world.2

The university has also not been immune to these pernicious conflicts and tensions. In the marketising education sector, many of us are routinely encouraged to produce more visible outputs that actively seek to influence the shape of policy and practice.3 For some of us, the proof of our research's worth is increasingly seen in measurable, tangible impact.4 It is not that any of these activities are unimportant. Indeed, both of us have undertaken publicly engaged work along some of these lines. But the idea that the academic essay once held total primacy over the field, such that academia's guiding mantra was ‘publish or perish’, seems almost halcyon by comparison.

It is because of this technological, cultural and political context and not in spite of it that we feel the written word, the academic essay in particular, has renewed urgency. A common mockery of academic writing—in contrast to all other forms of nonfiction and reportage—is that it is slow. ‘What do we want? Change! When do we want it? After blind peer review!’ is a familiar rejoinder to this mediated pace. We think that is in fact our great boon, the distinctive feature that strengthens academic writing. Here are the products of work undertaken with patient inquiry. There are findings and facts, as well as questions, doubts, challenges and theoretical provocations. All are worth considering. Each has arrived after long periods of ardour in thinking, listening, looking, analysing, discussing, theorising and paying attention. That is the academics' craft.

If such work takes time, it is because the problems this journal addresses—political, social, cultural, theoretical and ethical—refuse easy or hurried answers. The prisons hold too many people and for too long. Practices that hold promise and potential are frustratingly underused: community penalties, restorative justice, open prisons, the list goes on. The demands of the police are many, yet despair that they continue to let us down run concurrently. Technology is morphing how citizens are being surveilled and monitored. Indeed, the concepts of citizenship, identity and civil rights are freighted with polarisation. So much suffering is invisible and overlooked. The legacies of colonial violence continue to linger, while nationalism has reemerged as a major political motif. Then, there is war, invasion, genocide.

What is to be done about any of this? We do not claim what is published here offers definitive answers. Rather, in the pages of The Howard Journal (in print and online), we hope that readers will continue to find sustained efforts that think through, interpret and critically engage with these moral dilemmas and practical problems, along with many others.

This is not then simply about being a place to publish, but a journal that is home to ongoing dialogue and that takes a community, of course. The strength of The Howard Journal is the product of collective endeavour, on the part of peer reviewers, editorial board members, authors and, of course, readers. We have been heartened to have found this in the short period since we have taken on the editorship. We are especially pleased to be supported by our many new members of the Editorial Board, as well as the new Associate Editorial Board members: Tom Guiney (University of Nottingham), Roxanna Willis (London School of Economics), Nicola Carr (Trinity College Dublin), Manuel Iturralde (Universidad de los Andes) and Lesley McAra (University of Edinburgh), who will support us in the direction and development of the journal.

Together, we intend this journal to remain a place that appeals to readers and authors who are fascinated and troubled by the world around us, curious to understand the persistence of injustice, to consider what a better future might look like, to raise theoretical questions about why it is not so. To meet the politics of our times, we are eager to read new ideas and perspectives. We hope to publish parameter-pushing articles, pieces that challenge us to reconsider what we have taken for granted or overlooked. We encourage articles that take intellectual risks or that recast familiar problems and reorient popular topics using critical perspectives.

Overall, our interest is in publishing the very best ideas, research, analysis and most edifying debates regarding harm, justice and security. To achieve that, we want to encourage submissions from across the globe, and The Howard Journal of Crime & Justice will continue to be a keen publisher of articles by authors from, and research about, countries that are not within the English-speaking and Western nations. In encouraging diversity, we want to be a place that is known for championing new voices, those who will make up the next generation of intellectual leaders in the field, and therefore we encourage doctoral researchers and early career academics to submit their work to us.

We are also eager to publish novel contemporary research and theoretical contributions from the wide array of disciplines that underpin criminology, such as sociology, history, law, psychology, political studies, philosophy, anthropology and beyond. We hope this interdisciplinarity and international scope contributes in some small way to the field's ongoing development as it does to deepening our understanding of the matters that concern us.

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This is no defence of the imperious academic journal model, with its paywalls, high library charges and staggering annual profits. However, we hold passionately to the importance of critical scholarship about justice and to the need for peer-reviewed journals to host sustained debate and discussion. In the troubling times we face today, serious academic writing—reflective and analytical writing produced over a longer time and intended for the long term—has a renewed salience. Walter Ong wrote that ‘writing’, rather than being something that only communicates ideas, it ‘is a technology that restructures thought.’ Ong's argument was that ‘more than any other’ technology, ‘writing’—and hence, reading—‘is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realisation of fuller, interior, human potentials’ (Ong 1986,32), because these are ‘consciousness-raising and humanizing’ acts (Ong 1986, 48). Then, in our current light-speed information ecosystem, churning out the verbal and the visual, being both a writer and reader is as political a position as it has ever been.

Given the parlous state of the academic sector in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, even those of us with the time to research, write and review articles rarely find that it is enough, given the demands such work entails. However, we continue to do so, to be impelled forward, because it matters to us. Why exactly we write, read and review surely feels personal, but when we reviewed the back catalogue of Howard Journal articles, we suspect there might be something of a broadly shared ethos, similar in part to George Orwell's famous response to the statement: ‘why I write.’ It was, he wrote, its ‘political purpose’.5 By this he meant moving a conversation forward, to tip it in some other direction, to intervene, exposing some falsity of thinking but also, if reasonable, to encourage optimism about what can be better.

It is in that spirit—of political purpose and cautious optimism—that we assume stewardship of The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice from Ian. We hope that readers, reviewers and authors will take the journal forward with us, ensuring that it remains a vital forum for theoretical analysis, research and critique, equal to the challenges we face in the world today and in the future.