Challenging Racialised and Gendered Criminalisation: An Analysis of Processes of Criminalisation, Institutional Failure, and Strategies to Counter Hegemony through Knowledge, Intervention, and Solidarity.

Clarke, Becky Joy (2025) Challenging Racialised and Gendered Criminalisation: An Analysis of Processes of Criminalisation, Institutional Failure, and Strategies to Counter Hegemony through Knowledge, Intervention, and Solidarity. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Both the exponential rise of women’s imprisonment and an enduring over-representation of racialised communities in criminal legal outcomes are global issues. This analytical narrative presents ten publications that offer new ways to see the complex and interconnected factors driving distinct racialised and gendered patterns of criminalisation. A focus on ‘gangs’ policing, joint enterprise punishments, and the criminalisation of girls and mothers, reveals how legislation, policy, and practice reproduce criminalising narratives and intervention. Across the analysis, criminalisation emerges as a process that conceals institutional failure. The collaborative research underpinning the publications demonstrates how by centring affected communities we can advance new ways to know. Critical social research has the potential to dis/re-articulate complex institutional and social processes, and thus challenge powerful criminalising assumptions and imaginaries. By engaging in varied approaches to developing ‘cases’, epistemic orthodoxies and silencing can be disrupted. Whilst challenging existing conventions, interventionist research inevitably surfaces new dilemmas. Most significantly, how we engage in both knowledge and politics, without compromising the potential of either. It is not enough to ‘see’ or ‘know’, we must intervene. Countering the hegemony and harms of criminalisation relies on building new strategic alliances. Critical social research can contribute to these sites of resistance, by both disrupting hegemonic discourses and practices, and setting alternative agendas. Yet how such work is resourced and where it is located is less clear. Reflecting on a series of collective interventions, I explore what is required to maintain alliances over time, and in the face of hegemony’s backlash. This body of work has sought to reignite a conceptualisation of criminalisation, on an active assumption that things could be otherwise. I share a commitment, with my many collaborators, to shape compelling visions and alternative responses to harm that can one day replace these failing institutional processes.