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Southern Criminology is a theoretical perspective that shifts the focus from the state criminal justice process to global inequalities, transnational crime, and postcolonial politics. While recognising the importance of this shift in perspective for a globalising world, this paper asks two difficult questions. Firstly, how easy is it to generalise about whole regions of the world in advancing a political viewpoint? Secondly, is it possible for those in the West to imagine an alternative global criminology, if non-Western societies really do have different cultural values and epistemologies? For example, how should we respond to traditional practices among Indigenous Australians or a Confucian understanding of crime? These questions may make a Southern Criminology sound impossible in the same way as other varieties of critical theory. But this paper is intended to strengthen this emerging movement by acknowledging, and working through, potential difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the housing affordability crisis in Australia deepens, policy-makers have expended considerable resources in establishing new regulatory practices to enhance the role of the community housing sector. Ostensibly, the rationale for a new tier of regulation is to assure potential institutional investors (e.g. pension funds, investment trusts and banks) that community housing organisations are accountable and safe places to invest. Our paper adopts an alternative reading of diversity and housing regulation, drawing upon the governmentality thesis advanced by Michel Foucault in an empirical study about the early stages of regulation of affordable housing providers. Amongst our claims are: first, that policies to diversify and regulate the housing sector constitute a radical political project to commercialise welfare provision and second, these policies are likely to generate additional bureaucratic burdens and close off possibilities for progressive reform. The paper also considers the value of the governmentality approach for critical investigations in the field of housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comment considers the prospects for qualitative research in criminology by considering four recent texts: Bartels and Richards (2011), Westmarland (2011), Copes (2012), and Gadd, Karstedt and Messner (2012). Together they indicate a growing interest in qualitative methods, and even an emerging movement or sub-field. There is still, however, a tendency to present qualitative methods in one-dimensional terms as equivalent to the fieldwork tradition in anthropology and symbolic interactionism, without appreciating the value of discourse analysis as a means of collecting a different type of qualitative data, or the distinctive nature of different theoretical traditions. In addition, most texts see qualitative and quantitative research as complementary. It may be difficult to achieve a rapprochement or synthesis through combining or mixing methods, since qualitative and quantitative researchers, when pursuing scientific objectives, ask different questions and follow distinctive logics of explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various papers related to criminology within the issue including the history of ethnographic techniques in criminology, characteristic of a long and/or intense period of observation and review of the book "Courting Kids" by Carla Barrett.

There is a continuing debate within juvenile justice between the approaches of welfare and justice. Those advancing these arguments often present young people as a deviant group who should be punished by tough measures such as detention, or as victims who require social support rather than criminal sanctions. This, however, may exaggerate the seriousness of offending and the severity of the response in the majority of cases that come before children's courts. Drawing on observational research in Tasmania and Victoria, this article describes the minor cases that come before magistrates, and the considerations employed in sentencing. The article argues that what takes place in children's courts can equally well be understood as culture contact, in which adults spend considerable effort trying to socialise the young, often with limited success. This ethnographic approach has implications for those advocating greater intervention in the lives of young offenders, even if this is targeted at those most at risk. This is because many offences that are brought before children's courts are revealed to be quite trivial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]