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

• Author: Ahmed Ajil,Lauren N. Moton,Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill,Victor St. John
• DOI: 10.1177/21533687221087352
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

In Their Experience: A Review

of Racial and Sexual Minority

Experience in Academe and

Proposals for Building an

Inclusive Criminology

Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill

1

,

Victor St. John

2

, Lauren N. Moton

3

,

and Ahmed Ajil

4

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 under-

standings of social phenomenon, including of life in the academic sphere. In the pre-

sent 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.

Keywords

inclusive criminology, race and ethnicity, gender, sex and sexuality, academic

profession, diversity, equity, inclusion

1

Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

2

Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, MO, USA

3

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY, USA

4

University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland

Corresponding Author:

Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill, Arizona State University, 411 N. Central Ave Suite #600, Phoenix, AZ, 85004,

USA.

Email: kbh@asu.edu

Article

Race and Justice

2022, Vol. 12(3) 457-480

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/21533687221087352

journals.sagepub.com/home/raj

Introduction

There is now near universal consensus that the academy should be representative of the

societies it purports to study. Few would contend that efforts against sexism, racism,

homophobia, transphobia, or the like are wrong, or that racial, ethnic, sexual or gender

identities are not worthy of academic interest. These sentiments are shared largely

across disciplines, including criminology and criminal justice (CCJ). In our own writ-

ings on the CCJ academy, we have acknowledged positive trends in racial diversif‌ica-

tion among faculty (Ajil & Blount-Hill, 2020; Blount-Hill & St. John, 2017), and

others have noted a transition from ref‌lexive marginalization to greater inclusion

(Greene et al., 2018). Meanwhile, gender barriers have been breached; in addition to

CCJ’s large numbers of women faculty, Rice et al. (2007) highlight several who are

now “star”scholars. While the CCJ academy within the United States is most certainly

not yet representative of the U. S. public across class, color, or caste, there is little dis-

agreement that inclusivity is an appropriate aspirational value. There also appears to be

widespread acceptance that the goals implicit in this value have not yet been achieved,

neither in society nor the hallowed halls of academe.

Several facts commend the inauguration of a more “inclusive criminology.”

Diversity of background among faculty and students often correlates with diversity

of thought, of understanding, of experience, of perspective. Mechanisms and environ-

ments that reduce the success of diversity through marginalization or exclusion serve

not just as barriers to the excluded but also obstruct the wealth of thought, understand-

ing, experience, and perspective these individuals might bring. Morally this exclusion

may be wrong. Yet even from the self-interested view of a science, it is certainly bad.

Science advances by covering evermore ground, f‌illing evermore gaps, correcting

evermore inaccuracies. A narrower science is limited and, when applied to a diverse

world, often wrong. We emphasize inclusivity as a measure –perhaps the measure –of

scientif‌ic quality, such that those who engage in more exclusive forms of criminological

inquiry engage in a lesser and inferior science, not just morally but epistemologically,

methodologically, and substantively. Architects warn that the form of a thing should

follow its function; that is, how something is built and designed should support its

purpose. Therefore, inclusive criminology requires inclusiveness amongst the criminolo-

gists who engage in its work, students who apply its lessons, participants who provide

its data, interests which guide its gaze.

In early summer of 2021, the American Society of Criminology’s Division on

Women and Crime (DWC) convened a forum to discuss the imperatives of anti-racism

and of recognizing intersectionality within the scholarly project of feminist criminol-

ogy and in CCJ academia more generally. This event was not to be a singular occasion,

but rather a beginning of a continuing effort to address boundaries to racial, sexual, or

gender inclusion for faculty, students, publics, and points of view. In this present work,

we foreground the experience of Black, Indigenous and/or people of color (BIPOC)

and scholars and students identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer,

questioning, intersex, asexual, androgynous, or other gender or sexual minority

(LGBTQIA +). These populations represent historically marginalized groups whose

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