Department of Sociology
University of Tennessee
Phone:
865-974-7024 Fax:
865-974-7013 Email:
lpresser@utk.edu
I was born and raised in New York City, first Brooklyn and then Queens. The desire to leave New York and the desire to return to New York are key themes in my life story. Other themes include driving, culture, community, and gender. I now mostly-joyfully reside in a colorful bungalow in Knoxville, TN, with my children Ansel and Halen.
After receiving my Bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1987, I worked for four years as an advocate for elderly crime victims in Manhattan. That experience nurtured an enduring interest in crime, justice, and talk about crime and justice. My studies at Yale in program planning and evaluation, alongside courses that posed critical questions about social institutions and power, led me to research positions at New York City’s Department of Correction and Department of Probation. While working at these agencies, I met academic researchers who introduced me to the world of theoretical criminology. I decided to pursue graduate work in Criminal Justice/Criminology at the University of Cincinnati, and after earning my Ph.D. in 2002, I joined the wonderful Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee.
I study the role of language and discursive forms in social arrangements and action, including criminal action, and the promises and problems of restorative justice approaches to crime and other conflict. I approach my research from the perspectives of cultural sociology, critical criminology, and discourse analysis.
My second program of research is the framework known as narrative
criminology, which I first elaborated in a 2009 article for
Theoretical Criminology. The article has been cited
numerous times and the framework has received international
attention. It was the focal point of international symposia
on narrative criminology and narrative impacts held in Oslo,
Norway (May 2014, June 2017) and Copenhagen, Denmark (June
2018); it is central to the Nordic Research Network, and it
is the topic of Narrative
Criminology (2015, NYU Press), which
I co-edited with Sveinung Sandberg as well as Inside
Story: How Narrative Drive Mass Harm (2018,
University of California Press).
My third program of research is the elaboration of a general
theory of harmful action based on narratives, presented in
my book Why We Harm
(2013, Rutgers University Press). There, close-grained study
of intimate partner violence, genocide, penal harm, and killing
of nonhuman animals for meat allows me to demonstrate that
claims of being both licensed to harm and powerless to avoid
harming promotes victimization of discursively ‘reduced’
targets. The theory has implications for the foundations of
criminology in its primary emphasis on language, its redefinition
of crime as harmful action, its radical reflexivity, and its
proposition that indifference is consequential to action.
I have been drawn to using the theory specifically to understand
mass harms, with their special problems of mobilization and
organization, as in Inside
Story (2018, University of California
Press).
My fourth and oldest program of research concerns restorative
justice practices, which seek to repair harm and transform
relationships between victims, offenders, and communities.
A recent article in this line of research, based on in-depth
study of a victim-offender mediation program for juvenile
offenders, responds to critics who charge restorative justice
with reproducing structural inequalities (Presser & Hamilton
2006). In studying how restorative justice practices actually
work ‘on the ground’, I follow a time-honored
tradition in critical legal studies of assessing the gap between
the law as written and the law in action. Given my view of
talk and identities as collaboratively constructed, I see
hope, as well as hazards, for social justice in restorative
justice dialogue and other democratic processes. Emily Gaarder,
Denise Hesselton and I critically evaluated the institutional
relationship between restorative justice and correctional
treatment in an article for the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation
(Presser, Gaarder & Hesselton 2007). A current research
project, with Kyle Letteney, on youth courts in Tennessee
inquires into the fusion of restorative justice and procedural
justice, and explores what ‘community’ means to
young people. In addition to my own research, I help build
the knowledge base on restorative justice as an Associate
Editor of the journal Contemporary Justice Review.
