OPUS Collection:

Care ethics and critical friends: feminist research practice as an insider/outsider

2024-05-27T00:00:00Z

Title: Care ethics and critical friends: feminist research practice as an insider/outsider Authors: Kim, J; Biddolph, C; Shepherd, LJ Abstract: Building upon its development in educational scholarship, feminist scholars have incorporated the concept of ‘critical friend’ into their methodologies. Within political science, feminists have articulated critical friendship as relational research praxis, applying the concept to relationships between feminist academics and gender experts in institutions. We bring this research into conversation with feminist care ethics, asking how commitments to care ethics interact with commitments to being a ‘critical friend’ in feminist political science research. Based on interviews with feminist researchers, we argue that care is intrinsic to feminist research and underpins friendship. Whether or not it is explicitly articulated, the concept of ‘critical friend’ carries assumptions about the centrality and practice of care. These findings suggest that feminist scholars need to surface care explicitly in methodological discussions and articulate caring strategies, including self-care. Such surfacing must include acknowledging care as a source of depletion and nourishment, as well as fundamentally political.

Death, Grief, and Mourning in an ICTY Film: Exploring Relational and Non/Living Worlds

2024-03-14T00:00:00Z

Title: Death, Grief, and Mourning in an ICTY Film: Exploring Relational and Non/Living Worlds Authors: Biddolph, C Abstract: Abstract International criminal justice is filled with living, dead, and dying bodies. While witnesses detail atrocities in the courtroom, such testimonies are largely considered for their evidentiary value to establish innocence or guilt. In this article, I explore how death, grief, and mourning are represented at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). I focus on the ICTY documentary, Crimes Before the ICTY: Višegrad, to analyse how filmic representations of international criminal justice register dead, dying, and grieving bodies. Drawing on Queer Death Studies and relational ontologies, I explore the more-than-human and non/living worlds through which death, grief, and mourning are represented in the film. A queer relational approach reveals and challenges the construction of the dead as evidence and death worlds as crime scenes. This approach illuminates how the natural world and buildings, bridges, and artifacts are vestiges, witnesses, and sites of death and grief in Višegrad. My analysis explores how these representations in the ICTY documentary reinforce civilizational logics and reductive representations of violence at the same time as they illuminate relational encounters of death and dying in international criminal justice, thus enriching attempts to see, know, and feel loss in the wake of violence.

Queering the Global Governance of Transitional Justice: Tensions and (Im)Possibilities

2024-05-24T00:00:00Z

Title: Queering the Global Governance of Transitional Justice: Tensions and (Im)Possibilities Authors: Biddolph, C Abstract: ABSTRACT∞ In recent years, scholars and activists have been asking queer questions about transitional justice. Queer perspectives advocate for the recognition of anti-queer violence within transitional justice; the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in transitional justice processes; and the development of queer decolonial critiques of transitional justice. Informed by this research agenda, I develop a queer perspective to the global governance of transitional justice. I analyse documents from the UN, the International Center for Transitional Justice and the International Criminal Court. Representing mechanisms from across global transitional justice, I trace the (cis-heteronormative, colonial, carceral) violence of transitional justice and its institutionalization at the global level. I reflect on the queer tensions and (im)possibilities of global transitional justice, a site that is violent but holds transformative potential. The global governance of transitional justice must be queered to expand its social, political and conceptual remit, and to seek more radical, liberatory worlds within and beyond formal justice mechanisms.

A Latent Class Analysis of Online Victim-Offender Overlap among Chinese Youth: Examining Overlap Risks across Online Deviance Types

Title: A Latent Class Analysis of Online Victim-Offender Overlap among Chinese Youth: Examining Overlap Risks across Online Deviance Types Authors: Lin, K; Zhou, Y; Xu, B; Chang, LYC Abstract: This study aims to comprehensively test the applicability of lifestyle exposure theory (LET) against other criminogenic and victimogenic factors in predicting the differential risks of online offending-victimization overlap across multiple types of online deviance. Using self-reported survey data from 3,741 Chinese college students, the study performed Latent Class Analysis (LCA) and posterior multinomial logistic regression analysis. The LCA identified five latent classes of offending-victimization overlap, with only 6% of respondents reporting high overlap risk. Posterior multinomial logistic regression analysis showed that LET indicators and gender emerged as the most robust predictors of overlap risks compared to other theory-driven (e.g., control and routine activity theories) and sociodemographic factors. The current study accentuates the importance of methodological diversity in examining victim-offender overlap.