Dr. J. Scott Kenney  

B.A., L.L.B. (Dalhousie), M.A., Ph.D (McMaster)

E-mail: skenney@mun.ca

Sociological Specialties/Areas of Interest

• Deviance
• Criminology
• Victimology
  
• Symbolic interactionist theory
• Religion, ritual, and belief systems

Much of my earlier work focused primarily on victims of crime. My SSHRC-funded doctoral research examined the families and loved ones of homicide victims in their complex encounters with the criminal justice system, mental health professionals, self-help and victims' organizations, as well as in their more informal dealings with family and community. Issues of gender, self, social reaction and agency emerged as significant in each of these contexts, raising important questions about coping with the victimization experience.

I also conducted SSHRC-funded postdoctoral research on the unofficial "victim assignment practices" of three public vs. private victim services in Nova Scotia. I noted that despite evident awareness of the potential for victim assistance programs to encourage a further sense of victimization, along with various internal policies to avoid this outcome, each program did, in various ways, encourage claims of further victimization. These findings lend credence to the questions of critical criminologists as to whether victims' interests are indeed being served by victim service programs.

This work, along with my ethnographic study of restorative justice sessions, my historical study of the genesis of the victims' right movement, and a critical, comparative study of the treatment of crime victims in developing countries, culminated in the publication of my book: Canadian Victims of Crime: Critical Insights (Toronto: CSPI/Women's Press). Topics include: 1) the initial impacts of crime; 2) social dynamics encountered by victims in their families and informal social settings; 3) gender and coping attempts; 4) the criminal justice system; 5) encounters with victim service programs, support groups and shelters; 6) emotion and the rise of the victims' rights movement; 7) policy responses; 8) the interactional dynamics of restorative justice sessions; and 9) comparisons with the position of victims in developing countries. My book concludes with a chapter that considers the implications of this body of work for future research. Throughout, I critically consider the meanings that are presented - and that emerge - in various contexts experienced by victims of crime. The general thesis is that many victims, particularly victims of violent crime - are poorly understood, and that institutions and services set up to help them often have counterintuitive, even potentially harmful impacts, often representing more of an effort to make it appear something is being done than providing substantive programs.

Following this, I changed my research focus - away from crime and violent victmization and towards the much broader area of structured social interactions and their impacts on meaning. 

First, I recently completed a SSHRC-funded study of the ritual construction of meaning and identity among contemporary Freemasons. I interviewed 121 Freemasons in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, published a theoretical chapter, several journal articles, presented at conferences in the U.S. and U.K., recently published my book: Brought to Light: Contemporary Freemasonry, Meaning, and Society (Wilfred Laurier University Press). It empirically considers, from a broad interactionist perspective, both the methods used by contemporary Freemasons to comprehend the complex, multifaceted symbolism in their ritual, as well as the current meanings they pragmatically apply to their lives in the radically changed social conditions of today's society.

Second, I am developing theory and research on what I call "illegitimate pain." My work articulates the wide theoretical significance of painful, embodied emotions that are, in actor's everyday social, institutional and structural contexts, simply inexpressible. This is shedding light on the emergence of social problems claims-makers, the formation and nuance of social conflict in relation to identity-based new social movements, and holds variable significance in relation to the sociologies of deviance, victimization, the body, sexuality, and health. First developing, then elaborating this concept with Dr. Ailsa Craig, I subsequently fleshed it out through a study of emotion and the punishment dynamics in a strict, religious boarding school. In the past year I have been working on a book manuscript where I attempt to sociologically articulate the role of ideology in defining illegitimate pain, as well as to empirically examine how this operates in a number of controversial social and political contexts.