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This paper is intended as an overview and think piece, contributing to literature identifying accounting’s impact in making things knowable. Critical accounting research has always sought alternative ways of understanding the discipline and the legacy is extended here by considering pathways forward. Accounting continually impacts public policy in what it privileges for selecting and in what it silences and neglects. Given that humans are meaning-making we have choices, and this essay interrogates accounting techniques operating as façades while disguising social impacts. Promoting qualitative accounting research that reimagines these complexities and considers moral contexts is the substance of this essay, for advancing the public interest in accounting.

Our examination of accounting and violence aims to reinvigorate what it means to provide accountability and visibility given that knowledge and values are socially constructed. The authors follow the legacy of critical accounting research in this essay, using counter accounts, shadow accounting, and narratives to uncover the discipline’s relationship to violence, women, and migrants.

This chapter contributes to literature illustrating accounting’s impact in making things governable, thinkable, and knowable. Although critical accounting research has been exemplary in examining consequences of its practices on vulnerable populations, there has been a scarcity of investigation regarding incarcerated populace. This chapter begins the process of exploring neoliberal discipline, rule, and calculative techniques intersecting with gender, race, and class in prisons. For this disenfranchised population the construction of the “feared and deviant other” is of particular significance. A crime-control dynamic mythologizing and dreading the criminal has become so institutionalized that discourses justifying surveillance, dominance, and injustice have become normalized, in which accounting takes part. We are particularly interested in the impact for incarcerated women who are shackled, sterilized, and at risk, modes of control that are extraordinary. As such, the dynamics of knowledge creation challenges us to ask what initiates visibility and transformation. We suggest the narratives of incarcerated women are potential devices in this process, and add to an emerging literature revealing the emancipatory possibility of alternative, or counter-accounts. Seen as tools of resistance and change, we give voice to their narratives. As their accounts demonstrate resilience and power, we reject an inevitability of silence. Rather, these critical accounts provide pathways for thinking differently and aspiring for a change, as the social never disappears.