Rejoinder to Book Review of "Rural Transformations and Rural Crime"

Abstract

A review of a book we edited, Rural Transformations and Rural Crime (Bowden & Harkness, 2022) was published in Volume 32, Issue 3 of Rural Society (Scott, 2023) in December 2023. The review makes two key but highly misleading charges. The first is an intimation that rural criminology is dominated by a clique of scholars; and second that the book by and large lacks critical analysis to the reviewer’s liking. The reviewer provides a glimpse of a broad analysis of the field and adopts an independently minded position. Indeed, some observations and claims are made that should rightly be part of a wider debate in criminology, about the book’s relevance, and its impact and contribution to the social sciences: legitimate and important questions that ought to be addressed. However, a few errors in the review need to be corrected and cannot go unchallenged.