KITLV&VVI Research Talk
Social Context Matters: Researching Crime Across Countries, Across Cultures
- Presenter: Laura Bui; Discussant: Hoko Horii
- Date
- Friday 8 November 2024
- Time
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.30 (KITLV seminar room)
This talk will focus on recent and ongoing research on issues in studying and measuring crime and possible explanations for it cross-nationally and cross-culturally. It will discuss thinking-and-work-in progress so to receive feedback and insight from attendees. It will draw from a paper in press in International Annals of Criminology entitled: The ultimate difference: Interpreting and using ‘culture’ in comparisons of crime and justice, whose abstract and link to the postprint are below.
Abstract
This article examines culture, an ambiguous yet prevalent concept in comparisons of crime and justice. It investigates the extent to which culture’s application and meaning across research reflects Westerncentric bias in criminological knowledge-production despite it being a concept meant to advance understanding on different groups and places beyond the ‘Western’ worldview. The article extends the discussion on Westerncentric bias but also on culture in criminology by tracing the use of this concept on East Asian populations and by identifying patterns of application and meaning in international and comparative research through a scoping review of 230 journal publications. The findings address patterns of culture’s appearance in criminology journals in the past two decades and its meaning. Similar to previous scholarship on Westerncentrism in criminology, the article finds that this bias does, too, exists in uses of culture but also shows how culture’s conceptual ambiguity is conducive to this bias, in that some groups and places are given one meaning of culture while others receive another.
Postprint of article available here: The ultimate difference: Interpreting and using ‘culture’ in comparisons of crime and justice · CrimRxiv
About Laura Bui
Laura is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Chartered Psychologist. She specializes in the psychology of violence, scientific knowledge production, and cross-cultural studies. Holding a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and advanced degrees in psychology, her research critically examines how paradigms shape crime studies . Her work includes Crime in Japan: A Psychological Perspective, recognized by the Asian Criminological Society, which reinterprets Japan’s low crime rates through psychological insights. Currently a guest editor for the Journal of Criminal Justice, she is joining the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAAS) a research fellow, to explore the influence of East Asian philosophies on justice models in the Global North.