Kevin Walby

The polysemy of punishment memorialization: Dark tourism and Ontario's penal history museums

Contributing to debates about cultural representations of prisons and prisoners, as well as exploring the crossover between the dark tourism literature and cultural criminology, this article reflects on how penal museums in the province of Ontario, Canada, create and communicate meaning as it regards imprisonment and punishment. Drawing from field notes made after observations at penal museums located in central and eastern Ontario cities and towns, we contend that penal museum relics offer a polysemy of meaning to viewers, as critical, indifferent and punitive interpretations are possible. Based on analysis of tour guide narratives as well as penal relics, we explore how the process of memorialization in many of these museums is organized around the idea of penal reform, which positions imprisonment and punishment as remnants of the past and introduces a social distance between the punished and the penal spectator.

On the Social Relations of Research A Critical Assessment of Institutional Ethnography

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience and examines how textual sequences coordinate consciousness and ruling relations. This article explicates some of the shortcomings of IE, so future institutional ethnographers can work with these. I offer a critical assessment of IE, focusing on its ontology of the social and the issue of truncation, the constitutive hermeneutics of interviewing, and the production of possible subjects in data analysis. The promise of IE is its critique of traditional sociology and introduction of ethnographic practice inquiring beyond nominalism into extra-local social relations that, through texts, govern local action. But IE establishes itself in a binary of emancipation versus regulation, so it is less concerned with its necessary complicity in objectification. IE must continue to be a sociology of possibilities, open to its own contradictions and continual reflexive intervention into itself.

Interviews as encounters: issues of sexuality and reflexivity when men interview men about commercial same sex relations

Few qualitative sociologists have considered how men who have sex with men hold diverse understandings of sexuality and how these matter in research encounters, especially as it regards ‘touchy’ interview topics such as intimacy, intercourse and men’s bodies. Drawing from transcripts and field notes concerning my experiences of interviewing 30 male-for-male internet escorts in Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto (Canada), Houston and New York (USA), as well as London (England), I analyse moments where, as the interviewer, I was sexualized by respondents. A first question was often posed to me at the start of interviews: ‘are you gay?’ The ‘are you gay?’ question not only seeks out a singular identity declaration but also flips over established researcher-respondent roles, indicating that the reflexivity of the respondent is as important as the reflexivity of the researcher in shaping the conversation to come. My analysis demonstrates why it is important to consider the impact of researcher bodies and speech acts during interviews. Arguing that there are specificities of talk and gesture concerning queer sexualities that researchers must be aware of during interviews, I focus on how my responses to respondent propositions and sexualization shaped and modified the meanings produced through the research encounter.

Sporting Girls, Streetwalkers, and Inmates of Houses of Ill Repute: Media Narratives and the Historical Mutability of Prostitution Stigmas

This article examines the mutability of symbolic sanctions— or stigmas—applied to sex industry work by examining newspaper narratives in one medium-sized Canadian city over two time periods: 1870–1910 and 1980–2004. The articles purpose is first to get a sense of what the authors call the ecology of stigmas—their relation to the temporal and spatial contexts in which they are produced—and second to give needed historical context to them and the representational tropes that currently dominate media, policy, and academic discussions about prostitution. This article finds significant continuities and discontinuities between media representations during the two study periods. In particular, prostitution stigmas are constituted out of cross-articulations of narratives around containment, culpability, and contagion across the twentieth century, but the ideational contents and empirical referents of these narratives reflect the intersection of sex industry contexts with historically specific concerns around gender, sexuality, race, and social status. Stigmas of the sex industry, rather than being constant, reveal themselves to be both deeply ecological and accommodating to a range of concerns about female sexuality and normative behavior that are sensitive to historical time.

How Closed-Circuit Television Surveillance Organizes the Social: An Institutional Ethnography

Institutional ethnography is a sociological method of inquiry which problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience, while examining how series of texts coordinate actions, consciousness, and forms of organization in extra-local settings. This paper will demonstrate that institutional ethnography is a critically innovative way to study the socio-technical dynamics of camera surveillance. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance video should be conceptualized as a text which is active and activated, coordinating lived realities and facilitating organization at the institutional level within a specific ruling framework. Research was conducted with camera operators in a Suburban Mall CCTV control room located in Victoria, BC. The talk of CCTV operators in their work setting demonstrates how video is used to coordinate lived realities and facilitate extra-local organization. The findings of this study suggest the gravity of racialized profiling in everyday surveillance and complicate Foucaults Panopticon metaphor.

Access to information and freedom of information requests: Neglected means of data production in the social sciences

Access to information (ATI) and freedom of information (FOI) mechanisms are now relevant features of governments in many liberal democracies today. Citizens, organizations, and permanent residents in several countries across the globe can request unpublished information from federal, provincial, state, county, and municipal government agencies. However, most qualitative researchers appear to be unfamiliar with ATI/FOI or write it off as an approach used by journalists rather than as a way to systematically produce qualitative and longitudinal data about government practices. In this article, the authors discuss the use of ATI/FOI requests as a means of data production. The authors show how the use of ATI/FOI requests intersects with issues such as reflexivity, the Hawthorne effect, interviewing, and discourse analysis. The study objective is to foster a multidisciplinary discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of ATI/FOI requests as a data production tool.

Making up 'Terror Identities': security intelligence, Canada's Integrated Threat Assessment Centre and social movement suppression

Drawing on analysis of government records obtained using Access to Information Act (ATIA) requests, we examine policing and surveillance projects developed in preparation for three mega-events that recently took place in Canada – the 2010 Winter Olympics, the G8/G20 meetings and a scheduled (but cancelled) North American Leaders Summit. Based on an investigation of ‘Threat Assessment’ reports produced between 2005 and 2010 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), we discuss transformations within Canadas anti-terror intelligence networks including the establishment of Integrated Security Units (ISUs) and the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC) which resemble intelligence ‘fusion centers’ in the United States. These organisations became the knowledge-producing hubs for the classification and categorisation of national security threats. Examining shifts in ISU and ITAC Threat Assessments, we demonstrate how knowledge construction practices in security intelligence networks produce new categories of threat. Specifically, we focus on the newly constructed notion of ‘multi issue extremism’ (MIEs). Exploring the deployment of MIEs as a category of national security threat, we show how intelligence agencies have blurred the categories of terrorism, extremism and activism into an aggregate threat matrix.

‘They attacked the city’: Security intelligence, the sociology of protest policing and the anarchist threat at the 2010 Toronto G20 summit

Contributing to the sociological literature on protest policing at international summits, this article analyses security intelligence practices related to the 2010 G20 meetings in Toronto, Canada. Drawing from the results of access to information requests with policing and intelligence agencies at municipal, provincial and federal levels, the authors demonstrate the central role of intelligence and threat assessments in international summit policing. Focusing on intelligence practices and police training targeting the ‘anarchist threat’, they show how intelligence agencies conflated anarchism with criminality and targeted this purported menace for strategic incapacitation through a process referred to here as threat amplification. After analysing intelligence and police training for the Toronto G20, the authors discuss the implications of their findings for the sociology of protest policing. Comparing the ideas of strategic incapacitation and ‘intelligent control’, they suggest that the enfolding of security intelligence into international summit policing has intensified the practice of ‘making up’ threat categories and strategically targeting groups that fall outside the institutionalized spectrum of negotiation and accommodation.

Staged authenticity in penal history sites across Canada.

Literature on penal tourism has examined meanings of imprisonment and punishment communicated in infamous American (e.g. Alcatraz, Eastern State Penitentiary), Australian (e.g. Fannie Bay Gaol, Port Arthur) and South African (e.g. Robben Island) sites. Yet such research has not extensively drawn from academic debates on authenticity and heritage that have become prominent in tourism research. This article examines the staging of authenticity in lesser-known penal history museums located across Canada. Whether large and aesthetically impressive or small and dingy, the existence of museums in original heritage penal sites raises questions about authenticity and how it is staged. Based on an analysis of field notes and interviews from visits to 45 penal history sites in Canada, we present four strategies (preservation, restoration, importation and creation) used by staff and volunteers at penal history museums to draw attention to four types of authenticity (architectural and spatial, tactile and visual, existential and narrative) that reinforce claims about the purported realities of incarceration found therein.

Beyond folk devil resistance: Linking moral panic and moral regulation

This article is a contribution to widening the focus of moral panic studies. Our aim is to advance recent attempts to link moral panic studies to the criminological literature on moral regulation. We argue that moral panics should be conceptualized as volatile expressions of long-term moral regulation processes. To substantiate these conceptual and theoretical arguments, we examine claims-making activities about the threat posed by British youth who don hooded tops in public places.