Fieldnotes on a Study of Young People's Perceptions of Crime and Justice

Reviews / Votes

With Fieldnotes on a Study of Young People's Perceptions of Crime and Justice, Avi Brisman provides us an in-depth, close-up and invaluable look at the raw material and initial insights that ethnographic accounts are built upon. Weaving moments of self-reflection and biographical tidbits into raw fieldnotes, this book lifts the veil on the research and idea-building process. This rich, novel and highly readable contribution may help to catalyze the next wave of qualitative studies of crime and justice - and it will be particularly valuable and energizing to those heading out into the field for the first time.

Randy Myers, University of Washington, Tacoma

The poet Walt Whitman wrote, "I am large, I contain multitudes." Scaffolding as Structure is large, too, as measured not by word count but by the multitude of intellectual endeavors it contains. In it Avi Brisman ruminates on crime and criminology, sustains an engaged conversation with the young people and staff members he studies, and constructs an innovative text that is both prequel and sequel to his existing scholarship. Interwoven with all this are a backstage autoethnography of the research process and a rich account of its day-to-day particulars - and beyond that, a multitude of insights that escape the boundaries of conventional criminological writing.

Jeff Ferrell, Texas Christan University, Texas With Fieldnotes on a Study of Young People's Perceptions of Crime and Justice, Avi Brisman provides us an in-depth, close-up and invaluable look at the raw material and initial insights that ethnographic accounts are built upon. Weaving moments of self-reflection and biographical tidbits into raw fieldnotes, this book lifts the veil on the research and idea-building process. This rich, novel and highly readable contribution may help to catalyze the next wave of qualitative studies of crime and justice - and it will be particularly valuable and energizing to those heading out into the field for the first time.

Randy Myers, University of Washington, Tacoma

The poet Walt Whitman wrote, "I am large, I contain multitudes." Fieldnotes on a Study of Young People's Perceptions of Crime and Justice is large, too, as measured not by word count but by the multitude of intellectual endeavors it contains. In it Avi Brisman ruminates on crime and criminology, sustains an engaged conversation with the young people and staff members he studies, and constructs an innovative text that is both prequel and sequel to his existing scholarship. Interwoven with all this are a backstage autoethnography of the research process and a rich account of its day-to-day particulars - and beyond that, a multitude of insights that escape the boundaries of conventional criminological writing.

Jeff Ferrell, author of Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge