Critical criminologists often empathise with the oppressed groups they research, and some of them even declare they dedicate their professional activity to helping the marginalised. But empathy and its derived drive to help have shadow sides. The borders between helping and colonising, for example, can be thin. As critical criminology expands its areas of concern from class, gender, and race to include imperialism and global inequality, the question arises about how critical criminologists can help colonised groups without further colonising them. The ‘burden of proof’ is higher for Western critical criminologists. Criminology has colonial foundations, with some of its practitioners contributing to developing technologies of knowledge that were useful during imperialism and colonialism. Based on the data produced by a research project co-directed by Nigel South and I, which had three waves of data collection with Colombian Indigenous communities, this chapter discusses the advantages and shortcomings of peer methodology as a decolonial tool that Western scholars can implement to avoid further colonising the groups with which they empathise.

Among the most obvious participants of criminological research projects are individuals and groups that have been exposed to violence. Such exposure can potentially be a psychologically traumatic experience for them, regardless of whether they are victims, perpetrators, or witnesses (or all three). Participants of criminological research who have experienced psychological trauma may still be dealing with the consequences of trauma at the time of the research. While there are myriad books and articles about how to conduct fieldwork in criminology, there is a dearth of information about how to work specifically with participants who have experienced psychological trauma. In this chapter, we discuss the ethics of conducting research involving psychological trauma and offer hands-on strategies and considerations to apply before, during, and after a criminology project. We reflect on the ethics and practices regarding the participants, researchers and recipients of the knowledge outcomes. To illustrate, we draw on the experience of the second author (David) who interviewed dozens of direct victims of the violence perpetrated by drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s and combine these reflections with relevant knowledge from the discipline of psychology. 

Most methodological discussions about the pros and cons of repeat interviews fall within qualitative longitudinal literature and are premised on project designs with relatively long intervals between encounters. Less attention has been paid to the practice and ethics of repeat interviewing as a stand-alone method, that does not follow participants long-term, but instead conducts several interviews over a short period of time. This article is based on interviews and research logs from a project in which over 350 incarcerated persons in Latin America were interviewed. We evaluate the advantages and shortcomings of repeat interviewing, in this case, three sessions with each participant with up to a week in between sessions. We find that repeat interviewing increases trust and rapport, contributes to nuanced data, generates reflexivity, and ensures more ethical research by making it easier for researchers to care for participants. Yet the method also has the disadvantages of demanding a significant investment of resources, the risk of losing participants, and on occasion, the emotional challenge of breaking strong bonds when researchers and participants part ways. We argue that the advantages of repeat interviews exceed the shortcomings, but ethical concerns added to the cost in time, energy, and money might at times proscribe the method.

The dominance of modern rationality in knowledge production implies that the distribution of intellectual capital highly depends on the capacity to gather representative data and generate generalizable theses. Furthermore, as research becomes more formalized and dominated by large funding schemes, intellectual capital allocation is increasingly associated with high economic, labor force and institutional power. This phenomenon has consequences at the global level. As the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has documented, there are significant disparities between countries in research capacities, with a marked difference between “core” countries with semi-monopolies over sanctioned knowledge production and “peripheral” states primarily used as data mines. The core–periphery divide in research capacity brings about what decolonial theorists call knowledge abysses: the widespread idea that core countries are the ultimate knowledge producers and thus the legitimate guides in humanity’s road to “progress.” In that context, the democratization of knowledge and the prevention of neo-colonial dynamics require the development of cheaper and more accessible ways of collecting representative data. In this article, we make a call for innovations in methods that can serve to overcome this, and we illustrate possible avenues for achieving sound research without incurring high financial costs by describing and discussing our experiences in researching narco-violence in Colombia and prostitution in Russia with what we call the “taxi method.”