During my time at IIAS, I will be part of the research cluster ‘The Politics of Culture’.
My present research reminds me of the ancient Indian parable of an elephant and blind monks. It describes how each monk claimed to know what an elephant looked like by touching only one part of the animal. The story can be interpreted in diverse ways, but it could be understood that for one objective reality, there can be different subjective views about it because of where one is situated, broadly speaking. At least, that is my interpretation of the parable.
This research focuses on epistemological questions about what we know about crime and justice – the what, where, how, and why of this knowledge production. The process of scientific knowledge-making is assumed to be objective, but issues of access, infrastructure, underrepresentation, and sociohistorical relations may make it more subjective than originally believed. It will focus on Japan as a case study and will draw from philosophies that relate to the process of knowledge making, but also the extent of applicability of that knowledge into scholarly and institutional practice.
It elaborates on previous work that identifies the types of meanings and uses of the concept of culture in understanding crime and justice comparatively (Bui, 2024) . The significance of this issue and the main finding are summarized as follows: within international comparisons on crime and justice, culture is often emphasised to explain the uniqueness of criminological phenomena in East Asia. How culture is interpreted and used, however, cannot be separated from knowledge production that has long been Western-centric. As noted by scholars in 2021, this Western-centric bias is not a new observation, but few who work in the field are able to genuinely grasp the implications of this in the current context of knowledge-making. The main finding is that out of 230 criminology publications featuring culture, 66% of comparisons that used culture to mean ‘Individualism-Collectivism’ were on East Asian populations. Comparisons between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ populations often use culture to mean ‘Individualism-Collectivism’ to explain differences. According to this construct from cross-cultural psychology, individualism (characterised by independence) prevailed in the industrialised West – whereas collectivism (characterised by interdependence) prevailed elsewhere, so that they were seen as opposites and used to compare European American culture to East Asian culture.
Laura Bui — Research Explorer The University of Manchester