In Their Experience: A Review of Racial and Sexual Minority Experience in Academe and Proposals for Building an Inclusive Criminology

Abstract

Feminist criminologists were pioneers in highlighting that academics’ standpoints (i.e., their social and societal positionalities) influence which “objective” truth they tell. Testimonies, the sharing of one's story, can provide important angles to our understandings of social phenomenon, including of life in the academic sphere. In the present work, we introduce our conceptualization of “inclusive criminology” as a framework for integrating criminological inquiry into a cohesive whole which asserts societies’ rights to valid and complete knowledge as requiring inclusion of previously marginalized identities. In response to this requisite, we conduct a review of published testimonial narratives within criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) as well as a sample of works from other social sciences to inform recommendations on how to meet this inclusive aim.