LEAVING A 'STAIN UPON THE SILENCE': Contemporary Criminology and the Politics of Dissent

If academic criminology currently stands in rude health, this obscures a range of deeply disturbing trends in the content of the discipline. We begin by exploring the recent boom in Home Office funded research in criminology, examining the key theoretical and empirical issues that have been both included and excluded from the official research agenda. The content and expanding nature of this agenda is then placed within the wider context of the entrepreneurialisation of universities, particularly with respect to the marketisation of academic research and the disciplinary, self-regulatory effects that follow from this. As a paradigmatic process within these wider trends, we subject the Research Assessment Exercise to critical scrutiny. We conclude by noting some strategies that criminologists might pursue to combat the increasingly narrow and pernicious research agenda funded and sanctioned by the state.