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In this chapter, I present the methodological pillar of a Southern green criminology. It may prove useful for researchers and students interested in developing a science to end the ecological discrimination. My main concern in presenting this method is to upset the colonialist logic that sustains culturism and speciesism. In my ‘stereoscope’ of ecological discrimination, I aim to uncover harmful environmental practices that have a global reach and disproportionately affect the geographical and metaphorical Souths.

In this chapter, I present the historical pillar on which a Southern green criminology can build new knowledge. Employing a genealogy of Southern green criminology, I show how the Global South was producing Southern and green criminological knowledge long before they became foci of academic research. Based on my historical account, I argue that the tradition of the Global South in producing knowledge useful for the prevention of ecological discrimination demonstrates that Southern green criminology is a potent and feasible project. But, I also warn of the threat posed by the dynamics that made Southern and green criminologies disappear in the past and that still exist today.

The chapters in this book show that it is possible to conduct studies on the intersections between gender, criminalization, imprisonment, and human rights in Southeast Asia. In this conclusion, we draw out the implications of this emerging scholarship. More specifically, we critically examine how common talk about “individual needs” risks blinding criminal justice reformers to the structural, gendered dynamics that render people criminalizable and imprisonable. We explore the potential of the concept of participation to strengthen understandings and activism around gendered harms, and grapple with the thorny issue of for whom we speak. We advocate for cross-cultural understandings, developed in collaboration and through partnership, to productively challenge the ethnocentrism of criminology and propel truly transformative agendas. Three steps are identified to decenter research and activism: Scholars and activists must acknowledge the risks of attending to need while not attending to the drivers of need; resist the temptation to operate only within the limits defined by the authorities, the state, the academy, or agencies set up to protect; and generate “home grown,” counter-hegemonic solutions that push back against the tendency to universalize, colonize and deny difference.

The prospect of public sociology is beginning to be widely discussed and debated. Critics put forth several reasons for skepticism, one of which is that the program of public sociology, under the leadership of Michael Burawoy, will infect sociology with a Marxist drift. This paper examines whether this drift in fact comports with Marx's ideas on the relationship between scientific knowledge, the role of intellectuals in the class struggle, and the type of political action he advocated. It finds that critics are fundamentally mistaken about the extent to which Marx's ideas are expressed in public sociology's program.