U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

What is an Ethics Committee?: Academic Governance in an Epoch of Belief and Incredulity

NCJ Number
239491
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 52 Issue: 2 Dated: March 2012 Pages: 400-416
Author(s)
Simon Winlow; Steve Hall
Date Published
March 2012
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This paper examines developing discourse on the disciplinary and institutional governance of academic criminology: the Ethics Committee.
Abstract
The authors make one very simple claim that they hope might contribute to the developing discourse on the disciplinary and institutional governance of academic criminology: the Ethics Committee is one of a growing number of little others that attempt to compensate for the loss of the traditional symbolic order. While the focus is on the Ethics Committee and criminology, the authors believe that much of what they have to say is also applicable to other forms of academic governance that characterize the social sciences in the contemporary university. The authors will take a rather circuitous route to this conclusion in the hope that they might encourage criminological researchers to think seriously about the ways in which Slavoj Žižek's philosophical framework can be used to theorize criminology's position in the current post-political social order. (Published Abstract)