Abstract
When we issued a call for papers for a special issue on “Scholar-Activism in Feminist Criminology,” it was February 2025, just three weeks after President Trump was inaugurated for his second term. In those three weeks, Trump issued approximately 60 executive orders, including many that fall hardest on the most marginalized communities in the U.S—part of a dizzying onslaught aimed at reversing decades of progress. More than a year later, as we near publication of this special issue, we realize that to say these are “turbulent times” is an understatement.
Our call for papers requested empirical, theoretical, or conceptual articles that demonstrate the roles and impacts of scholar-activism and community-engaged research or teaching during turbulent times. We received 46 abstract submissions for our special issue with a capacity of 4 – 5 articles. Thankfully, Feminist Criminology Editors Dr. Vera Lopez and Dr. Lisa Pasko were kind enough to grant two special issues (July and October of 2026) on this theme so we could accept up to ten articles. The submissions we received demonstrated the incredible scholar-activism that is being done with communities, in classrooms, at universities, and within institutions. They also demonstrated a deep appetite for publishing outlets to respect and honor this work.
In March of 2025, the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Feminist Criminology Diversity & Inclusion committee hosted a Zoom open forum to talk about the role of feminist criminologists during these times. A colleague questioned how we can be talking about things like special issues when we need to be on the streets protesting or doing mutual aid to help those harmed by the administration’s policies. Our answer remains the same fourteen months later: we need a both/and approach. The scholars who are featured in our two special issues on scholar-activism are doing the work. They are working closely with communities deeply committed to justice and social change, with promotion, tenure, or other accolades as afterthoughts. It is an honor to have their work featured in these special issues.
Our July special issue brings together five articles that examine the “both/and” of scholar-activism. They share the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of feminist and justice-oriented scholarship within criminology — mapping the structural barriers that constrain such work and the tools being developed to resist them. Shallenberger and Bowman (2026) draw on institutional anomie theory — which explains how institutions become dysfunctional when market-driven goals crowd out commitments to values like equity and community — to propose a triadic framework that captures what feminist scholar-activists actually are: neither pure scholars nor pure activists, but people who embody a deliberate refusal of the academy’s artificial separation between research and justice. Ortiz (2026) draws on her own decade on the tenure track to show how criminology’s growing dependence on state funding has quietly shaped what counts as valid knowledge and who is trusted to produce it — systematically marginalizing “scholarvist” approaches rooted in lived experience, and falling hardest on scholars whose lives, identities, and communities are woven into the very questions they are asking. Powell et al. (2026) introduce abolition feminist storytelling as a methodology for researchers grappling with an uncomfortable truth: that carceral logics — the punishment mindset that treats criminalization and control as default responses to social problems — don’t just shape the systems we study. They also shape the stories we tell about violence and punishment in ways that limit what we see, study, and can imagine as possible. Brazzell (2026) draws on participatory research within the transformative justice movement to question the punishment-based idea of accountability —what they call “taking account,” where harm is treated like a calculation and punishment is expected to balance it out. Instead, they offer a framework of “giving account,” which sees accountability as something human and relational, shaped through our connections with others rather than by isolating people from one another. Suslovic and Rasmussen (2026) close the issue by proposing affective solidarity as a feminist tool for scholar-activists navigating the ethical complexities of working across university and community divides. Rather than grounding solidarity in shared identity, affective solidarity begins with emotional dissonance — the discomfort and friction that arise from witnessing injustice — and asks what can be built from that shared feeling of wrongness, even across very different lives and experiences.
All five articles are animated by a simple but urgent question: who counts as a scholar or expert, and at what cost? For feminist and critical criminologists within academia, the cost of an expansive definition of “expertise” is concrete and familiar — challenges on the path to tenure, grant rejections, and, for many, a steady accumulation of professional insults that make clear their work is merely tolerated, when it is not actively discouraged. While they do so differently, all of the papers are pushing back on a deeply held assumption in criminology: that quality research must be done at a distance. These authors disagree with the positivist notion of objectivity in research. They argue that being close to your subject — knowing harm from lived experience and from sustained relationships with the people most affected — produces and amplifies knowledge that detached, data-driven approaches cannot. The papers don’t reject rigor but reckon with what rigor means when the cost of getting it wrong is measured not in methodological error but in human lives. Finally, a throughline of feminist and abolitionist praxis — the integration of theory with action, grounded in a commitment to dismantling rather than reforming the systems that produce harm — connects all five contributions and pushes each beyond critique toward something generative. What unites these pieces is not a single prescription, but a shared insistence that doing this work differently is both possible and an ethical imperative.
The papers in this special issue share a conviction that the path forward for feminist criminology lies not in earning legitimacy on the academy’s terms, but in building new paths — grounded in alternative ways of knowing, standards of rigor accountable to communities rather than to metrics, and forms of solidarity-oriented scholar-activism rooted in justice rather than prestige. These are not comfortable arguments, and the authors do not make them from a place of comfort (Rajah et al., 2022). They make them from experience — from years of doing this work within academic institutions and with communities that invoke the language of justice while making it costly to pursue. That combination of intellectual honesty and hard-won conviction is, as much as any theoretical contribution, what makes this collection worth reading.