"The Tragic Meaning of Blood": Symbol, Myth, and the Construction of Criminology

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Keynote address delivered at the 2006 Western Society of Criminology Conference, Seattle, February 25, 2006

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is my sincere honor and privilege to join you today. I am particularly delighted to have this opportunity to address the Western Society of Criminology because it was only five years ago at the WSC conference in Portland that I began my journey as an academic criminologist. At the time, I was a doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, writing-or, to put it more honestly, struggling to write-the early stages of a philosophically-oriented dissertation about policing. Anxious and curious to see how …