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Critical Social Research as a ‘Site of Resistance’:
Reflections on Relationships, Power and Positionality
Author(s): Becky Clarke, Kathryn Chadwick and Patrick Williams

Source: Justice, Power and Resistance Volume 1, Number 2 (December 2017) pp. 261-282

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 261

Critical Social Research as a ‘Site of Resistance’:

Reflections on Relationships, Power and Positionality

Becky Clarke, Kathryn Chadwick and Patrick Williams1

Abstract
This paper creates an opportunity for the authors to reflect on our collective
efforts to create a space within the academy through which we can actively
support communities and groups who are challenging injustice. Herein we
consider the potential role of the academic in supporting sites of political or legal
struggle, how we work to, with and within groups or communities attempting to
resist State power. What is evident is the importance of reflexivity, considering
and articulating our position, as a guiding principle. The issues we examine here
are connected to our wider network beyond our collective work or institution.
In attesting to the virtues of critical social research, we draw upon our
experiences particular our ongoing work with, and contributions to, the
Hillsborough and JENGbA justice campaigns. When considered together this
activity reveals a number of emergent themes which give shape to our approach
in contributing to ‘sites of resistance’. We understand these spaces to be the
intersections where State power and its impact on the lives of those who
experience injustice is revealed. The site is then both a physical space of meeting,
but could also be conceptualised as a conscious space where, by coming
together, individuals, families, supporters, critical lawyers and academics, and

1
Becky Clarke is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Manchester
Metropolitan University. Her research interests include the gendered and racialised
experiences of penal and welfare policies, processes of ‘othering’ and
criminalisation, and the construction of knowledge (and ignorance). Email:
[email protected]
Dr Kathryn Chadwick is a Principal Lecturer in the Sociology Department at
Manchester Metropolitan University. Her main areas of research and publication
focus on gendered processes of criminalisation and punishment, challenging State
injustice, penology and the theoretical imperatives of critical criminology. Email:
[email protected].
Patrick Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Manchester Metropolitan
University. His research interests include the disproportionate impact of criminal
justice processes and interventions for racialised individuals and communities.
Email: [email protected]

VOLUME 1, NUMBER 2.
262 CLARKE, CHADWICK AND WILLIAMS

other stakeholders make sense of the injustice together. Through this collective
awakening the group can draw strength and generate strategies to challenge
State power. It is in these spaces that resistance can be developed, nurtured and
discussed.
The principles for discussion within this paper include: ‘being there’, ‘bearing
witness’ and acknowledging injustice, of our relationships to marginalised
communities and powerful institutions, and the significance of positionality
(Scraton, 2007). Our aim then, is to work within collective organisations in order
to expose and counter the hegemonic narratives and silencing processes through
research informed interjection as opposition (Hall 1986; Mathiesen, 2004). By
actively disrupting these discourses we can contribute to a process of re-
humanising the ‘Other’, where the complex and historically situated
relationships between communities, institutions and the State can be exposed
(Scott, 2013).

Introduction

We fight the same battles over and over again. They are never won
for eternity, but in the process of struggling together, in community,
we learn how to glimpse new possibilities that otherwise would never
have become apparent to us, and in the process we expand and
enlarge our very notion of freedom
(Angela Davis, 2009, cited in Davis, 2012: 198).

As academics, working out of the Sociology department at Manchester

Metropolitan University, we are committed to exposing, analysing and
campaigning around social and criminal injustice and inequality. Through
teaching, research and wider work with communities we endeavour to examine
and intervene in the marginalisation and criminalisation of groups characterised
by difference, reflected in the continued ‘othering’ of individuals in society
generally, and criminal justice contexts specifically. This paper draws upon
reflections of a number of significant moments, from our ongoing relationships
with groups who are resisting injustice. These reflections not only starkly expose
the failures of the criminal justice system to deliver justice for all, here they also
enable us to examine and illustrate features of the process and experiences of
critical social research.
As with others previously (Cohen, 1988; Hillyard, Sim, Tombs and Whyte,
2004), we find it difficult to affiliate ourselves to a discipline where much
(mainstream) output attests to research that is fixated with and perpetuates the

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 263

criminological ‘Other’, that is ‘the threatening outcast, the fearsome stranger,

the excluded and the embittered’ (Garland, 1996: 461). Where administrative
and realist criminological approaches serve not only to delineate the
criminalised other, they dangerously act to (re)produce the Other (Spalek,
2008).
Over a number of decades now, the field of critical criminology has sought
to work against this tide, to expose processes of pain infliction and punishment
through criminalisation, which are disproportionately deployed against
marginalised and powerless members of society (Anthony and Cunneen, 2008,
Coleman, Sim, Tombs and Whyte, 2007). The challenge for critical theory and
methods is to promote engagement in research that contributes to an
alternative discourse, questioning the connection between relations of power
and processes of legitimacy (Scraton and Chadwick, 1991). In doing this, there
is a shared commitment to exposing the significance of personal troubles as
public issues; voicing the view from below; challenging the basis of legitimate or
‘expert’ knowledge; questioning the dominant knowledge base that underpins
policy and practice (Scraton, 2007; 2009).
Our collective research activity takes as a starting point that constructs of
‘crime’ and the process of criminalisation should be subject to academic and
political challenge. In recognising that responses to ‘crime’ are
disproportionately experienced, the strategies underpinning our research
specifically acknowledge the interplay of structural relations such as race,
gender, class, age and sexuality. Our concern is that research informed
responses to challenge these issues are too often met with silence, the
suppression of dissenting voices and the continuity of destructive policies and
practices which further marginalise particular groups. Our approach is therefore
one in which we “recast research as a form of resistance” (Scraton, 2007: 17).

Interventionist Critical Social Research

In discussing the reshaping of the Institute for Race Relations (IRR)2 in the 1960s,
Sivanandan reflected that “the Institute became far more than a professional
organisation; it was rather a servicer of movements” (1990: 13). This perhaps
gets closest to expressing how our work has engaged with groups and

2
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is at the cutting edge of the research and
analysis that inform the struggle for racial justice in Britain, Europe and
internationally. http://www.irr.org.uk/

VOLUME 1, NUMBER 2.
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communities challenging injustice explored below. In recognition that as

academics, we have a responsibility and a duty to promote, expose, resist and
alleviate injustice, which manifests in gross social, economic and political
inequalities resulting in mass criminalisation and imprisonment, Hillyard, et al.,
(2004: 384) call for research that is “decidedly interventionist”. They suggest
critical researchers often share a “Milibandian ‘coincidence of interests’ with
community-based organisations with respect to documenting the deleterious
harms generated by the activities of powerful individuals, organisations and
institutions…”. In 1974 in the context of penal abolition, Thomas Mathiesen
advocates ‘action research’ committed to the disclosure of information and the
foregrounding of political values in the research process. While in 1987, Sim,
Scraton and Gordon discuss the significance of interjecting into public debates
that may impact on legislation and policy, with interventionist research which is
united in a “commitment to demystifying and exposing the workings of State
power in its institutional forms…” (Sim, et al., 1987: 10).
Here we take the opportunity to outline and reflect upon our commitment
to developing critical analyses which prioritises structural contexts and their
relation to personal experience. In doing this research alongside campaigners,
activists and victims, we attempt to counter the ‘ceaseless chatter’ (Foucault,
cited in Hillyard, et al., 2004: 371) within British criminology and the
preoccupation with research that simply advocates the extension of the criminal
justice apparatus, by taking on those issues labelled the ‘sustained silences’.
David Scott (2015) in creating a dialogue “against criminal injustice” highlights
the importance of “making the invisible visible” advocating a position where we
“must prioritise highlighting the human costs, harms, injury and damage of neo-
liberalism and penalisation”.
Our work has clearly been influenced and guided by critical scholars through
their research and publications over a number of decades (Mathiesen, 1974,
2004; Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts, 1978; Gilroy, 1982; Sim et al.,
1987; Sivanandan, 1990; Carlen, 1998; Scraton, 2007, 2016a; Spalek, 2008;
Scott, 2015). We recognise the significance of ‘cases’ and the need to closely
monitor how they are processed, enabling a critical scrutiny of operational
policies and practices of State institutions. Equally and intimately linked is the
requirement to develop research prioritising the “experiences and struggles of
individuals, neighbourhoods and identifiable communities”, where the
emphasis is on establishing “the view from below” (Scraton, 1987: ix). In this
context, Scott (2015) refers to the voices of the “concrete others” recognising
and acknowledging individual human context and that “each voice comes from

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 265

a specifically situated position, standpoint or worldview rather than a

generalised and abstract universalism” (Scott, 2015).
Drawing on these broader principles, here we explore the complexities and
challenges of engaging in an interventionist research agenda of ‘being there’
and ‘bearing witness’, of building relationships with groups and campaigns
engaged in resistance, whilst continually attending to our relationship to power.
This necessitates a brief contextualisation of cases central to our research
activities. Following long-standing and intermittent work examining the legal
processes and the subsequent impact on survivors and families of the deceased,
associated with the Hillsborough football disaster, working alongside fellow
researchers and family campaign groups, one researcher reflects on two years
of attending and monitoring the new Hillsborough Inquests between March
2014 and April 2016.3 Two further researchers consider their on-going work,
which attempts to disrupt the official narrative and impact of the racialized
concept of the ‘gang’, using this as a lens to understand the re-emergence of
collective punishment in the form of Joint Enterprise4 laws (Williams and Clarke,

3
For nearly three decades, families, survivors, supporters and academic activists
have been fighting for justice in the name of the survivors and the 96 who died at
the Hillsborough football stadium in 1989. The original Inquest verdict of accidental
death was quashed in the High Court in December 2012. The new Inquests
commenced in March 2014 in an attempt to address the many simple and
unanswered questions into how and why 96 people died while attending a football
match. The verdicts delivered in April 2016 exonerated the fans, survivors and
deceased of any blame by ruling that the dead were ‘unlawfully killed’. The Inquest
jury in returning a narrative verdict made 25 criticisms against those in positions of
power and 16 of policing before, during and after the tragedy. Truth and justice
finally prevailed but accountability has yet to be realised.
4
Joint Enterprise (JE) has emerged as a prosecution tool for the collective
punishment of groups where it can be proved that the suspects were ‘in it together’.
Controversially, it applies even where the suspects may have played different roles
in many cases, or where a suspect was not in the proximity of the offence
committed. Intrinsic to the application of the doctrine is the principle of ‘common
purpose’ where it is alleged individuals have conspired to commit a crime together.
Moreover, where such a ‘common purpose’ is shown to exist in committing one
crime, all the participants may be held liable for other crimes committed by one
member of the group, even though they may not have participated in or intended
that the further crime should have been committed. Instead, JE has been contingent
upon police and prosecution teams demonstrating possible ‘foresight’, that is,
establishing some association between those involved to demonstrate a shared
‘belief and contemplation’ that the principal ‘offender’ might commit the offence.

VOLUME 1, NUMBER 2.
266 CLARKE, CHADWICK AND WILLIAMS

2016). They reflect on their campaigning work with JENGbA5 and most recent
involvement with families from racialized communities whose children are
currently in prison or on remand awaiting trial under joint enterprise legislation.

Being There

For over two decades critical researchers have sought to disrupt existing and
persistent regimes of truth concerning those who died or survived the
Hillsborough disaster, and the powerful official narrative of how and why the
disaster occurred (Coleman, Jemphrey, Scraton and Skidmore, 1990; Scraton,
Jemphrey and Coleman, 1995; Scraton, 2013). This has been done by working
alongside those affected groups whose stories and testimonies have been
silenced, discredited and ignored during the many institutional and legal
processes attempting to investigate the disaster. By speaking ‘truth to power’
this research has examined, sought to understand and critically expose the
powerful institutions involved in the disaster in an attempt to re-humanise and
centralise the victims and demand truth and accountability from those
dominant institutions (Scraton, 2012).
One of the authors of this paper has been part of a team of researchers
attending the new inquests; engaging in this process was significant for a
number of reasons. Critical social researchers have emphasised the importance
of ‘being there’ and ‘bearing witness’ as fundamental to any research process
seeking to challenge State power and discourse. Citing Lucy Maher’s work and
her use of the concept ‘being there’, Joe Sim “captures the dilemmas of critical
research in process” (in Scraton, 2007: 5) and of bearing witness to an act, a
moment and to distress. As Scraton (2007: 240) himself says: “critical work is
about bearing witness, gathering testimonies, sharing experiences, garnering
the view from below….”. Being there and bearing witness were essential
elements in researching the new inquests. As a scrutineer, attending the two
year inquest, the objective was to observe and subject the issues, events and
formal processes to a critical examination. The primary tasks were to document,
to monitor, to observe, to hear, to record, to contextualise key themes and
issues, “taking as our point of departure the interests of those out of power
rather than those in power” (Mathiesen, 2004: 78). Yet being there and bearing
witness cannot be reduced to these tasks as it is also undoubtedly about being

5
Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA) is a grass roots campaign
launched in 2010 by families, supporters and ex-prisoners wanting to highlight the
abuse of the Joint Enterprise doctrine. http://www.jointenterprise.co/

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 267

present, being consistent, being approachable, being engaged and being a

support.
The qualitative documenting of official processes is crucial, involving
gathering and understanding information but also watching and subjecting to
analysis the interactions, the language, the rituals and the organisational
mechanisms of the court room and beyond. Central to this was hearing the
testimonies of others – the survivors, bereaved relatives, local residents, those
who worked at the stadium, those who planned and prepared for the football
match, the police, the ambulance and hospital staff and many others in official
roles. Significant in this process was recognising the different interpretations of
‘truth’ presented, recognising the varied vested interests at play in the court
room, whether that be self-interest, professional interest, or political interest.
The role involved making sense of these representations and committing to
challenge officially constructed narratives and discourse that continue to
demonise and blame football fans rather than acknowledge the deep and
multiple institutional systemic failures.
From early in the proceedings it became clear that there was more to
documentary research than keeping records and chronicling official court room
proceedings. In order to humanise and contextualise the experience of
attending the inquests it was necessary to capture, record and understand the
everyday experience of the different spaces from the moment of arrival to the
moment of departure. What happened alongside the formal sessions of the
inquest, before and after court, in recess, in family rooms, inside the court room,
outside the court room all become significant. The unofficial activities and
interactions between court room participants: the barristers, the solicitors, the
families, the survivors, their supporters, the public, the press and media
representatives, the court ushers and the researchers were equally worthy of
documentation as they also added understanding and a context to issues,
events and processes. The researcher would often sit and watch, listen to
different voices in different spaces, and document what was happening at these
times in order to understand wider personal, social and political power relations
in the context of the court room.
But the role of documenting and ‘being there’ is not simply about
observation, or taking, it is also about giving. The research role then not only
involved supporting established campaign organisations in this case the
Hillsborough Family Support Group but also individuals in some of the other
family groups. ‘Being there’ and ‘bearing witness’ then involved daily interaction
and dialogue with family members, some with whom a long-term relationship

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already existed and with others establishing new connections. These

interactions involved multiple roles: being a friend, a support, a listener, a
shoulder to cry on, talking through issues. Bearing witness daily to emotion in
the court room was difficult. From seeing the deep hurt, the sadness, the raw
emotion, the anger, and the lows, to the highs and laughter, was deeply moving.
Bearing witness to the pain of others alongside viewing and hearing often
disturbing and deeply upsetting evidence presented in court through
photographic imagery, video footage, written and verbal witness accounts was
often painful and at times unbearable. Managing this range of emotions
personally, while attempting to appear strong and supportive was a constant
challenge and one that was not always possible to achieve, on many occasions
the tears flowed in court as they do now reflecting on the experience. The
support of one’s own community, family, friends and colleagues was essential
throughout in processing these emotions that flow from this experience of
doing critical social research.
The challenge and significance of reflecting on the management of emotions
has been both neglected and underestimated in critical social research. In one
attempt to address this a number of researchers (Drake, 2012; Drake and Earle,
2013; Earle and Phillips, 2015; Sloan and Drake, 2013; Jewkes, 2012) reflecting
on their work in prisons suggest that knowledge and understanding is
“deepened and enriched when researchers identify and systematically process
their emotions as a form of data” (Sloan and Drake, 2013: 24). Moreover, as
researchers we often occupy a privileged position, in bearing witness to the
experiences of others and to State institutional processes and practices.
Subsequently we have a duty to share and communicate this knowledge.

Building Relationships, Building Resistance

Critical social research has the potential then to build strong alliances (Scraton,
2016a), with researchers being part of support or campaign groups, contributing
to sites of resistance who collectively seek to reflect, discuss, plan and act on
events, cases or issues which expose injustice. Yet such groups are not easily
defined, or necessarily self-identified, as being sites of campaign or struggle. In
this section we will consider how as researchers we become part of an existing
collective, often in response to an invitation to join or contribute.
Following the tragic murder of an 18-year-old young man in a community
racialized as black, the local police force has charged thirteen young people with
murder. Twelve of the thirteen are of black or mixed-race heritage and the

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 269

youngest defendant is fourteen years old. All thirteen have entered a ‘not guilty’
plea at Crown Court and will now face trial. We understand, from the police and
defence solicitors, that these individuals will be prosecuted under joint
enterprise laws. We have become part of a group established by some of the
young people’s families and local youth workers, sharing a collective concern
that the use of joint enterprise will lead to the conviction of those who are not
guilty of the murder. These concerns reflect the precedent we know exists for
miscarriages of justice with the application of collective punishment strategies
such as joint enterprise. We are driven to be involved in this case as we argue
that the collective punishment of thirteen young people, including a fourteen
year old child, will represent a serious injustice.
The weekly meeting of this group in a local youth centre reveals the
ambiguity of an emerging space, which might be reflective of a site of resistance.
Two of the authors were invited into this group on the basis of their research
backgrounds and their existing relationships with those working in the local
communities. Their recent research had involved analysis of a similar set of JE
cases, and wider official datasets, which examined the relationship between
joint enterprise convictions, the ‘gang’ narrative and processes of racialization.
Whilst the community workers who had existing relationships with many of the
young people and their families also had long standing connections to the
researchers, the families did not know each other or the two academics.
Being invited into this newly established group we were unfamiliar with each
other, coming together at an early stage in the legal process ahead of the Crown
Court trial. There is a need for care. Whilst we cannot predict the outcome of
the court process, our experiences as researchers and the evidence we have
previously gathered suggests a likely injustice will occur. Our previous research
exposes the strategies and mechanisms which the various institutions in the
process, the police and the prosecution, will deploy in court to secure the
collective punishment of the young people. Whilst offering a powerful insight
into the workings of this process, and potential strategies for opposition to it,
we must take care. Understandably the families are already devastated by
events thus far, with feelings of fear, pain and disbelief on their part exposed in
each meeting. At this stage the group of families are meeting for mutual support
and may not see themselves as part of a wider struggle against injustice, and
why would they? We cannot speak for what the collective means to those
families, or the handful of local community workers who turn up each week to
listen, reassure or offer support. We can only represent it as we see it, what we

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270 CLARKE, CHADWICK AND WILLIAMS

are each doing or bringing to the group, how it feels for us to be present or why
we feel driven to be involved in this particular case.
It can be viewed as a duty, or obligation, of the academic to engage in critical
social research which seeks to challenge State power and voice the interests and
understanding ‘from below’ (Scraton, 2007; Mathiesen, 2004). Yet connected to
this duty lies a deep-rooted moral and political motivation to intervene in
reaction to our recognition that their injustice necessitates resistance. Face to
face with the raw pain and emotion, such as that experienced at the
Hillsborough Inquests or in the local JE family support group, it becomes
impossible not to be moved and motivated to interject. The commitment here
is to the collective of families and the wider community experiences they
represent, to a shared grief, concern or anger, which swells from the disbelief
and desperation that something must be done. What our role should be or can
be in relation to this particular legal case is a process of negotiation with the
families.
As has been captured above, one offer of service to the group can be to ‘bear
witness’ to the experiences they face as the case of their loved ones progresses
through the legal system. Beyond this, an understanding of what, if any,
intervention can be made emerges through dialogue. The potential interjections
may range from: engaging in private written correspondence with key senior
officials in the local area; the opening up of our networks and inviting key
campaign, legal or political figures to attend and speak with the group; the
writing of an open letter or other public statement to expose the hidden and
problematic features of this case,6 connecting the local case to a wider campaign
group involved in public protest and activist strategies. The merits of these are
considered collectively with decisions led by the families. It is a slow and
tentative process. Our experiences thus far reveal how cautious the group is to
act openly, to challenge the system or publicise the case. In part this exposes
the stigma the families experience, the power of the pathologising narrative of
the ‘suspect’ parents and the ‘violent black gang’ residing within the
‘problematic neighbourhood’. Reflecting on shared local histories and our
research we anticipate these narratives which are likely to surround discussion
of their children in court and the media. Initially the group of individuals, or
individual families, feel powerless to counter the State apparatus of the criminal
justice institutions and the media, they are silenced. Yet as the collective space
grows and feelings become shared, the possibility of having a voice strengthens.

6
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/27/unfair-criminalisation-of-
moss-side-residents

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 271

At the time of writing, and in response to damning media reports of the initial
days of the trial of their children, the families support one another to be part of
a local radio show to alert the community to their struggle and to develop a
collective statement should the media seek their views on the trial.7 This is
significant because as Scraton (2016a: 10) rightly states: “For most prisoners,
unsupported by political movements and rejected by their communities, there
is no collective resilience”.
Our relationship with the JENGbA campaign group reveals how, with
support, such groups can grow in their collective resistance. Over a number of
years we had been regularly inviting local families, mothers with sons in prison
serving JE sentences, into the university to speak with our students and be part
of events raising these injustices with wider audiences. Our relationship with
some of the women and families then pre-dates the formation of the JENGbA
campaign, and since its inception we have been involved in their organising
conferences (in Oxford in 2013 and 2016). In 2015, with JENGbA and other
partners including the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies,8 we were funded to
undertake a research project exploring the experiences of their inside
campaigners – the prisoners serving JE sentences. JENGbA were integral to the
research process as the hidden nature of this issue meant their established links
to a network of JE prisoners was essential.9
Over the last five years JENGbA have not only established the network of
inside prisoners and their families on the outside but also built a broad base of
other support. As is acknowledged by Mathiesen (2004) the process of
organising in political opposition to institutional silences requires a broad range
of approaches and contributions. He advocates for groups which extend to
become inter-professional, drawing on the expertise and networks of a range of
professions in order to share experiences of comparable challenges. The work
of Mathiesen and the penal abolitionist network KROM in Norway also
demonstrates the importance of ‘engaging the client group’ or ‘users’ (ibid: 59).
In the case of JENGbA, however, they have led the process of building an
influential coalition, engaging professionals including lawyers, politicians, media

7
A Soundcloud recording of Legacy FM ‘Search Engine’ programme can be accessed
via Northern Police Monitoring Project.
https://twitter.com/npolicemonitor/status/857940713245466624
8
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies are a London based charity which aims to
inform and educate about all aspects of crime and the criminal justice system.
9
There currently exists no available data on the use of joint enterprise at charge or
sentencing in England and Wales.

VOLUME 1, NUMBER 2.
272 CLARKE, CHADWICK AND WILLIAMS

journalists, film-makers, musicians and academics from a range of disciplinary

backgrounds. Is this reflective of other campaigns? It arguably is of Hillsborough
too. What potential strengths can be created by linking sites of struggle? These
questions are central to our collective work, reflected in events and writing,
under the ‘sites of resistance’ banner.
Hall (1986), in his appraisal of Gramsci’s conceptualisation of hegemony,
reminds us that our collective resistance will not be composed of a single
homogenous class, but will have a ‘complex social composition’ made up of a
‘system of alliance’. Strategic alliance therefore must develop in recognition of
sustained hegemonic ideas located within civic society. Resistance then to anti-
hegemonic ideas, must be developed and fought within ‘voluntary associations,
relations and institutions of civil society – schooling, the family, churches,
religious life, cultural organisations, so-called private relations, gender, sexual
and ethnic identities’ (ibid: 18). For Hall, such spaces become in effect the
‘trenches’ in the war against such ideas.
JENGbA then have garnered some unusual allies and support, from across
the political or media spectrums. This arguably reflects their understanding that
opportunities to engage in work to support the collective goals of the campaign
lie in a range of places, including within those very same State institutions who
have the power to shape and deliver the ‘justice’ process. Such dynamics to their
community of resistance suggest that JENGbA recognise that ‘contingent spaces
exist within and between organisations and institutions and those who work
within them’ (Hillyard et al., 2004: 385). The events convened in early 2016 to
launch the Dangerous Associations report, from local community events in
Manchester and London, to a large session in the House of Commons, which
included political representatives from all parties and cross-house, are
testament to this. Similarly, a key breakthrough for the Hillsborough campaigns
was the revelations of new evidence related to the review and alteration of
police statements, which came from within the State – an ex-police officer
turned whistle-blower. Yet it is the pressure of the campaign that precipitated
the whistle being blown.
These reflections demonstrate the potential for building a broad alliance and
drawing on a wide range of voices and positions in such campaign groups. Yet
we must also remember that we continue to work with only some of those
impacted by the issues we explore. For example, JENGbA are in touch with 800
cases (JE prisoners and or families), but it has estimated that there are at ‘least
1800 and up to 4590’ people have been prosecuted for JE homicide over the
period 2005/2006 and 2012/2013 (McClenaghan, et al, 2014). Similarly, in

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 273

relation to the local JE case less than half of the families of the young people
who have been charged with murder are part of the family support group. As
critical social researchers we must be mindful of those who are not ‘there’ in the
collective spaces, being alert then not only to those whose pain and experiences
we are listening to but also those whose voices are not heard, who remain silent.
Whose voices or experiences are foregrounded in the campaigns, the
research and the collective work? Where individuals, families and groups are
not present, what might this represent? Could it be that for some embracing
invisibility is a source of resistance whilst others are unable to be actively
involved due to a range of personal circumstances, for example due to health
issues, financial constraints or other commitments.

Relationship to Power – Institutional Support and Resistance

Finally, we consider our positionality and the relationship to power of our

research as it manifests in three specific ways. Firstly, reflecting on our own
power in the research process, to classify ‘evidence’, (re)shape narratives and
(re)construct representations through our work. Secondly, by considering our
role as critical researchers in challenging State power and injustice, how we are
at once in multiple relations to power as we speak with and to those who are
powerless and powerful to address injustice. Thirdly by acknowledging the
wider context and location of our work as it sits within powerful institutions,
such as the academy and those who may fund or commission our research.
We inevitably exercise our own power as academics when we shape the
research projects we are engaged in and use this process to construct narratives
about issues or communities. To recognise and reflect on this power is a
fundamental step in critical social research. Carlen (2012) identifies dilemmas
which confront researchers who are variously positioned.

Critique and politics are played to different rules and the critical
campaigning criminologist or the critical criminologist engaging in the
development of crime and justice policies is just as likely to be
compromised by political strategies for securing particular objectives
as is the administrative criminologist employed by the official
agencies (Carlen, 2012: 24).

Similarly, inherent in research are the risks of ‘othering’, of affording agency

beyond what really exists or, conversely, of denying agency through
deterministic representations of individuals or communities (Krumer-Nevo and

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Benjamin, 2010). It is our contention that all criminological research, including

that which regards itself as critical or realist, risks further (re)presenting of the
‘offender’ as decontextualized, dishistoricised and disconnected from those
structural relations, which govern and mediate our political realities (Krumo-
Nevo and Sidi, 2012). The power of representations and their role in
constructing regimes of ‘truth’ are central to critical social research.
The discussion of analysis and our relation to data further reveals this
relationship to power, the power to classify, to construct frameworks through
which cases or issues are analysed, understood and conveyed. Our experiences
of gathering and analysing official data from multiple sources demonstrates that
whilst there are undoubtedly benefits of using the criminal justice system’s own
data to expose contradictions which require explanation, there are also risks. In
our case through the construction of comparable data sets on ‘gang’ flagged
individuals or events and incidents of serious youth violence we were able to
disrupt the problematic yet enduring racialized conceptualisation of youth
violence in the UK. However, by examining these issues through the lens of the
State, we ultimately risk engaging in and legitimising official definitions and
constructs of violent crime, albeit at the same time problematizing the ‘gang’.
The resistance of dominant narratives or classifications, which are used to
construct stories about those communities, issues or events experiencing
injustice, can be understood as a process of challenging silencing techniques.
For example the ongoing contributions of critical research offered in service to
the Hillsborough campaign groups to challenge the State sponsored ‘truth’ of
the Hillsborough tragedy. Or the ongoing commitment to unearthing data,
official statistics and voices from below, in order to challenge a narrative which
uncritically seeks to explain a range of violent behaviours in society by blaming
individual or cultural deficits of racialized communities. In both these cases it is
important to recognise that the evidence to counter such narratives may already
exist, it may even be available to the public through official documents or
statistics. For example, where a Home Office research study identifies that “the
most serious forms of street robbery are perpetrated by white and not black
people yet continues to reinforce the view that African-Caribbean males were
disproportionately associated with mugging” (Barker et al., 1993; cited in
Walters, 2009: 201). Or how, over twenty years later, data published by the
London Assembly Police and Crime Committee (2016) demonstrates that less
than 5 percent of serious youth violence is flagged as ‘gang related’, yet the
policy and practice response to youth violence in England’s capital city remains
that of an ‘anti-gang strategy’ focussed disproportionately on racialized

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 275

communities (LAPCC, 2016; cited in Williams and Clarke, 2017). These

knowledges remain silenced. The established hegemony of the regimes of
‘truth’, the legitimacy which they are granted and their echo across a range of
media and academic spaces make them impervious to the counter evidence.
The alternative discourse requires constant work to interject in the noise and
‘leave a stain on the silence’ (Hillyard, et al., 2004). Whether this be by the
chronicling of injustice through factual film making or fictional story telling,10
interjecting into media debates across a range of platforms, or within academic
spaces and discourses, the creation of sites of resistance must be plural, diverse
and consistently attended to. As explored previously, campaigns such as JENGbA
have worked hard over time to establish a diverse ‘community of resistance’.
Working within these collectives can be mutually beneficial to many of those
involved, including critical social researchers seeking to engage in challenging
hegemonic narratives, where powerful interests may seek to shape or influence
our work. As Scraton (2007) observes, critical social researchers can be subject
to challenge in efforts to silence, in the worst cases such work can bring
“suspicion, marginalisation and hostility, as powerful interests defend their
corner” (Scraton, 2007: 17). During the long course of our collective work we
have experienced a number of moments in the research process which attest to
such efforts to silence.
Whilst the academy can be a valuable support in our endeavours, as we have
experienced from the faculty we work in, there can also be wider interests or
relations in universities, which make the promotion of critical social research
findings less attractive to an institution. In our experience, at different times the
same findings may be viewed otherwise by the university. For example, the
institution chose not to actively promote critical research findings related to the
policing of ‘gangs’ in Greater Manchester, when the academy was
simultaneously seeking to develop lucrative financial partnerships with these
powerful institutions in other contexts.11 However, at other times or in a

10
English screenwriter and producer Jimmy McGovern who has written and
produced critically acclaimed fictional dramas about both Hillsborough
(‘Hillsborough’, first televised in 1996) and Joint Enterprise (‘Common’, first
televised in 2014). There have also been numerous documentary and non-fictional
programme about both justice campaigns, most notably Director Daniel Gordon’s
‘Hillsborough’, first televised in the United Kingdom in 2016, and ‘Killing the Law’
Directed by Anton Califano which is currently in production.
11
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/alison-white/policing-academia-
exporting-expertise-importing-marketisation
http://www.mmu.ac.uk/news/news-items/5319/

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different context the exchange and promotion of the same critical social
research findings may be seen as valuable ‘impact work’. 12 Such examples
reveal the contradictory nature of the relationship between the State and the
academy in a contemporary context of neoliberal agendas. The space to
challenge dominant narratives and critique practices of the State can be opened
up, but often require the navigating of the powerful, shared interests of the
State and universities.
In her work researching the police, Gilmore (2017) recognises the stark
differences for those researching with the police on policing, versus researching
with the policed on policing. She notes the significance of lucrative contract
arrangements, such as the N8 Policing Research Partnership, which tie academic
institutions to research underpinned by restrictive policies, ultimately enabling
the State to set and oversee research agendas.13
Negotiating such interests can similarly occur outside of the academy. We
have on a number of occasions experienced those who commission or fund
critical social research seeking to influence the tone or emphasis of our work
according to their values or interests. Other critical scholars have reflected on
the experience of being managed by sponsors, especially State institutions,
when producing knowledge under their control (Walters, 2009). As Mathiesen
(2004: 72) reminds us, “state-initiated research has a tendency to produce
silence as far as criticism of the State is concerned”. Yet in our experience this
can also extend to those funders who may appear outside of the State, the large
‘independent’ charitable trusts or philanthropists who strive to appear
politically neutral. It would seem that once the research findings step into the
realm of implicating powerful institutions, commissioners of all kinds are
apprehensive of dissent.
In our experience, what can ensue is a strategic battle of wills, where the
commissioning group (whether from within or outside of the State) requests
changes, for example the removal or adjustment of language which is perceived
as unnecessary or “inflammatory”. On one occasion we were told that we must
replace the term ‘racism’ with ‘race’, and on another to remove the term
“institutional racism” from the discussion, even though the research
participants quotes are undoubtedly speaking to such processes. These
challenges are not only highly offensive, they are also revealing about the
failure, even from those who perceive themselves to be independent of politics,

12
https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/news/joint-enterprise-research-wins-
award
13
https://n8prp.org.uk/

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 277

to engage in critical explanatory discourses which question the hegemonically

sanctioned core beliefs of the State. By necessity then, critical resistance
emerges in the periphery, in defiance of the dominant core beliefs of society.
For Hammersley (1995), evidence that runs counter to those core beliefs cannot
be taken seriously, it becomes ignored. Furthermore, “defensive cognitive
strategies may be developed specifically to protect the core from criticism”
(Hammersley, 1995: 73). In these situations, where managers, commissioners
or funders exercise privilege and power over the knowledge being produced,
drawing the strength and support from the wider collective is invaluable. For
example when the access or ownership of knowledge, or the networks and
opportunities to influence or disseminate, lie outside of the institutions, such
pressure can be managed and pushed back, but it is not easy.

Conclusions

Working to the principles of critical social research provides opportunities for

academics to interject, to work in support of, or in service to, campaigning
groups resisting injustice. There are significant challenges presented by working
in this way, and we have attempted to reveal these through the examples
discussed. Such research is often undertaken in the periphery, with the priorities
being driven by the campaign groups and the wider communities impacted by
criminalisation and injustice. Here then “the significance of critical research is
marked by close association with people’s movements and community
campaigns” (Scraton, 2007: 239). Given such knowledge and collective work is
shaped in these marginal spaces the act of being there, or of bearing witness,
then becomes fundamental to this approach. Being responsive, offering our
time and energy to react in support of such groups who are out of power, in the
moment where an opportunity may open up to challenge a strategic silence,
expose contradictions or disrupt accepted truths.
Whilst the outputs from this type of work, such as the Dangerous
Associations report (Williams and Clarke, 2016) or the various publications
produced by the researchers documenting the Hillsborough campaign
(Coleman, et al., 1990; Scraton, et al., 1995; Scraton, 2016b), may imply a linear
project. In fact the critical social research process is messy and complex,
involving emotion and intuition. The contribution is inevitably ongoing in its
nature and is therefore driven by a longer term commitment to a case or issue
and is underpinned by our positionality – a recognition of injustice, a rejection
of the processes and discourses driven by the State; and a desire to intervene.

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Yet such approaches inevitably present dilemmas and contradictions. We

have reflected on the various relationships to power. The tensions which arise
when we seek to counter institutional narratives and intervention, yet when our
research may also necessitate using power and privilege to support access,
funding or influence.
Writing this paper presented us with an important opportunity to reflect on
what we are doing in our shared work. As we have been writing, in March 2017,
we have also hosted a series of ‘Sites of Resistance’ events in Manchester. The
three public events have brought together the broad alliances involved in justice
campaigns - families, activists, film-makers, academics, and young people
leading change in their communities. These spaces have been convened to
continue to build alliances in which issues of truth and voice, power and
knowledge, can be explored in order to resist pervasive hegemonic ideas (Hall,
1986).
These themes and commitments reveal the principles underpinning our
work. That in order to support collective sites of resistance we must: re-
humanise the ‘Other’, those individuals, groups and communities who have
been marginalised; acknowledge that ‘crime’ is a construct, driving inequalities
and injustice in its disproportionate application to particular groups and
communities; refuse to accept State or institutional narratives, whilst also not
uncritically reproducing the assumed ‘reality’ of the communities reflected in
our research; recognise the value of building broad alliances for collective
thought and action.
The contribution of research to collective efforts underpinned by
interventionist principles is demonstrated by the significant achievements of the
justice campaigns discussed in this paper. For example, the UK Supreme Court
ruling on joint enterprise in February 2016, and the Hillsborough New Inquest
verdicts in April 2016. Yet such victories must be placed in the context of broader
structural issues and State power. Innocent sons, daughters, mothers, fathers
and loved ones remain in prison and their release is not guaranteed. As such this
must remain the goal of a shared longer-term visionary strategy. Hall reminds
us that it is precisely at the point where the power of the State is in crisis, in the
case of joint enterprise the acknowledgement of the legal ‘wrong turn’ which
may affect hundreds of life sentenced prisoners, when hegemony is reinforced
and sustained (Hall, 1986).
As demonstrated here, critical social research can facilitate the demands of
campaigns and groups for an oppositional agenda and exploit the contradictions
which inevitably exist within powerful institutions and systems. These become

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 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AS A ‘SITE OF RESISTANCE’ 279

the sites for the disruption of the narrative or accepted truths. Working
collectively, the challenge is to build a critical voice to support and empower
sites of resistance. Such spaces demand that we remain attuned to injustice’s
‘touch’ (Tate, 2016) and sensitive to the pains of structural harms,
discriminations and inequalities which lie at the heart of institutional processes
of criminalisation and injustice.

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