What is an 'ethics committee'? Academic governance in an epoch of belief and incredulity

Abstract

We want to make one very simple claim that we hope might contribute to the developing discourse on the disciplinary and institutional governance of academic criminology: the Ethics Committee is one of a growing number of little others that attempt to compensate for the loss of the traditional symbolic order. While our focus is on the Ethics Committee and criminology, we believe that much of what we have to say is also applicable to other forms of academic governance that characterize the social sciences in the contemporary university. We will take a rather circuitous route to this conclusion in the hope that we might encourage criminological researchers to think seriously about the ways in which Slavoj Žižek's philosophical framework can be used to theorize criminology's position in the current post-political social order. © 2011 The Author.