Richard McDonald
BA: SOAS; MA: SOAS; MSc: LSE, MSt. Cambridge
Please message me if you want to talk about any of my essays, or anything in general!
I am a Head of Policy in the Civil Service and an MSt Student in Criminology and Penology at the University of Cambridge.
My previous research revolves around queer theory, subjectivity, Japanese religion, sexual risk, and continental philosophy.
I have a forthcoming publication with Bloomsbury Publishing examining far-right radicalisation in English and Welsh Prisons, and have also written several journalistic pieces on the topics of homonormativity (LYRA Magazine), queer futurity (RAW Forms Magazine), and mental health (London Student).
Supervisors: Sîan Hawthorne, Alessandro Castellini, Silvia Posocco, and Loraine Gelsthorpe
Please message me if you want to talk about any of my essays, or anything in general!
I am a Head of Policy in the Civil Service and an MSt Student in Criminology and Penology at the University of Cambridge.
My previous research revolves around queer theory, subjectivity, Japanese religion, sexual risk, and continental philosophy.
I have a forthcoming publication with Bloomsbury Publishing examining far-right radicalisation in English and Welsh Prisons, and have also written several journalistic pieces on the topics of homonormativity (LYRA Magazine), queer futurity (RAW Forms Magazine), and mental health (London Student).
Supervisors: Sîan Hawthorne, Alessandro Castellini, Silvia Posocco, and Loraine Gelsthorpe
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Papers by Richard McDonald
This essay will also observe gender in a more abstract manner by taking the intervention of transgender and non-binary experiences as a foil to a static employment of ‘gender’. Similarly, we will test whether viewing individuals as those harbouring vulnerabilities (Gelsthorpe, 2022) and needs that render one more or less likely to commit – and be the victim of – certain types of crime, can enable us to tread beyond the boundaries of ‘gendered’ analysis. Such approaches may enable us to see men and women as less dimorphic creatures, instead as fluid and dynamic objects of study “…exposed to others, vulnerable by definition…” (Butler, 2009: 33).
This essay ultimately contends that considering gender is pivotal to understanding and improving CJS responses to violence but cautions against viewing it in a silo or as a static category. While suggestions for theoretical and practical ‘improvements’ will be mounted in each section of this essay in a cumulative fashion, the analysis will conclude by looking specifically at the interventions of Problem-Solving Courts as an example of a gender-informed response to violence that might elevate us past the conversation of ‘what works for women’ into the realm of ‘what works for everyone?’.
This essay contends that Critical Criminology is a verdant, forceful, and diverse field of inquiry which continues to shoot a nerve up the spine of criminological orthodoxy. Green and Feminist approaches provide complimentary paradigms which highlight the strong offer made by critical traditions. Limitations such as western centrism and a sometimes poorly actualised critical ambition, are real, and clearly damage the applicability of critical insights, particularly in Global South contexts. Additionally, there are genuine ethical questions about the potential for critical traditions to resign prisoners to their fate rather than seeking iterative changes to reduce suffering. This essay will thus suggest that critical criminology could temper its limitations by taking seriously post-colonial critique of its western-centric disposition, and the need to balance radical critique with pursuing an immediate relief to suffering.
This paper concerns the philosophy of Deleuze (& Guattari), Karan Barad, and Donna Harraway
This paper seeks to compare notions of female and feminine impurity in Japanese religions, including contemporary ‘Shinto’ and several strains of Buddhism. This work will draw from the work of Japanese Feminists such as Noriko Kawahashi and others to identity the similar and disparate places the feminine inhabits in Japanese religions, resting on a genealogical methodology and theoretical framework to account for: western authorial bias, the possible inapplicability of Western terminology and the historical, social and political discourses that have framed and enabled the treatment of women in Japanese religions. A portion of this essay will thus be invested in accounting for practices and describing material realties, which will be flanked with a theoretical engagement with the greater rubric of ‘feminine filth’ in Japanese religions. This work will also draw on ethnographic research with transgender kami-worshippers and Shinto practitioners based in Japan, whose various experiences of exclusion/inclusion from Shinto sites reveals the way in which gender paradigms in religion deal with complicated gender identities and performativities. More succinctly, the ‘Transgender question’ in female exclusion allows us to worry the biological essentialist arguments for female exclusionary practices in Japanese religions.
This paper will establish and utilise a Foucauldian discourse analysis as its methodological approach in a consideration of the ways in which British colonial power helped to forge disparate and diverse communal and localised practices in India into what became known as the modern largely Brahmanical ‘religion’: ‘Hinduism’. Conversely, attention will also be paid to the ways in which popular academic discourses on the colonial construction of religion can work as neo-colonialist practices which erase the autonomy of practitioners who engaged in theological debate with the British colonial forces, becoming complicit in the homogenisation of Hindu practice. Furthermore, David Lorenzen’s conception of a Hindu religion forged out of pre-colonial interactions will also be considered to highlight the ways in which binaries of coloniser and colonised other continue to bestow unwarranted grandiosity to the role of British colonial power in the construction of Hinduism. Finally, this paper will assert that the production of a modern, Brahmanical Hinduism is the result of asymmetrical yet productive colonial power relations, that cannot be reduced to binary conceptualisations. Žižek and Mandair will enable the nuance inherent within the establishment of a religious Hindu subjectivity to be evoked.
Understanding how the changing social positioning of the gay male has enabled particular sexual practices or ‘sexualisations’ to occur is a sensitive affair that requires both an understanding of the political, social and medical discourses that embellish the symbol of the gay male in the cultural imaginary, and an understanding of the psychic process that determine how one psychosexually responds to and internalises information – as a gay male - that may influence their sexual desires and practices.
This paper attempts to satisfy the titular question through looking inward at psychoanalysis as a discipline, specifically the work of Melanie Klein, Freud, Bersani and Dean as well as outward towards the object of study: gay sexual risk. By examining the changing relational dynamic between the discipline and object of study, alongside a critical analysis of how psychoanalysis has - at different points - failed and succeeded in explaining gay desires for sexual risk; this paper hopes to offer an answer that speaks to: the ways in which psychoanalysis has changed in its approach to sexual risk; how it deals with modern actualisations of gay sexual risk, and how well its tools can blend with other forms of analysis in order to temper its own inabilities to account for such actualisations.
This essay will also observe gender in a more abstract manner by taking the intervention of transgender and non-binary experiences as a foil to a static employment of ‘gender’. Similarly, we will test whether viewing individuals as those harbouring vulnerabilities (Gelsthorpe, 2022) and needs that render one more or less likely to commit – and be the victim of – certain types of crime, can enable us to tread beyond the boundaries of ‘gendered’ analysis. Such approaches may enable us to see men and women as less dimorphic creatures, instead as fluid and dynamic objects of study “…exposed to others, vulnerable by definition…” (Butler, 2009: 33).
This essay ultimately contends that considering gender is pivotal to understanding and improving CJS responses to violence but cautions against viewing it in a silo or as a static category. While suggestions for theoretical and practical ‘improvements’ will be mounted in each section of this essay in a cumulative fashion, the analysis will conclude by looking specifically at the interventions of Problem-Solving Courts as an example of a gender-informed response to violence that might elevate us past the conversation of ‘what works for women’ into the realm of ‘what works for everyone?’.
This essay contends that Critical Criminology is a verdant, forceful, and diverse field of inquiry which continues to shoot a nerve up the spine of criminological orthodoxy. Green and Feminist approaches provide complimentary paradigms which highlight the strong offer made by critical traditions. Limitations such as western centrism and a sometimes poorly actualised critical ambition, are real, and clearly damage the applicability of critical insights, particularly in Global South contexts. Additionally, there are genuine ethical questions about the potential for critical traditions to resign prisoners to their fate rather than seeking iterative changes to reduce suffering. This essay will thus suggest that critical criminology could temper its limitations by taking seriously post-colonial critique of its western-centric disposition, and the need to balance radical critique with pursuing an immediate relief to suffering.
This paper concerns the philosophy of Deleuze (& Guattari), Karan Barad, and Donna Harraway
This paper seeks to compare notions of female and feminine impurity in Japanese religions, including contemporary ‘Shinto’ and several strains of Buddhism. This work will draw from the work of Japanese Feminists such as Noriko Kawahashi and others to identity the similar and disparate places the feminine inhabits in Japanese religions, resting on a genealogical methodology and theoretical framework to account for: western authorial bias, the possible inapplicability of Western terminology and the historical, social and political discourses that have framed and enabled the treatment of women in Japanese religions. A portion of this essay will thus be invested in accounting for practices and describing material realties, which will be flanked with a theoretical engagement with the greater rubric of ‘feminine filth’ in Japanese religions. This work will also draw on ethnographic research with transgender kami-worshippers and Shinto practitioners based in Japan, whose various experiences of exclusion/inclusion from Shinto sites reveals the way in which gender paradigms in religion deal with complicated gender identities and performativities. More succinctly, the ‘Transgender question’ in female exclusion allows us to worry the biological essentialist arguments for female exclusionary practices in Japanese religions.
This paper will establish and utilise a Foucauldian discourse analysis as its methodological approach in a consideration of the ways in which British colonial power helped to forge disparate and diverse communal and localised practices in India into what became known as the modern largely Brahmanical ‘religion’: ‘Hinduism’. Conversely, attention will also be paid to the ways in which popular academic discourses on the colonial construction of religion can work as neo-colonialist practices which erase the autonomy of practitioners who engaged in theological debate with the British colonial forces, becoming complicit in the homogenisation of Hindu practice. Furthermore, David Lorenzen’s conception of a Hindu religion forged out of pre-colonial interactions will also be considered to highlight the ways in which binaries of coloniser and colonised other continue to bestow unwarranted grandiosity to the role of British colonial power in the construction of Hinduism. Finally, this paper will assert that the production of a modern, Brahmanical Hinduism is the result of asymmetrical yet productive colonial power relations, that cannot be reduced to binary conceptualisations. Žižek and Mandair will enable the nuance inherent within the establishment of a religious Hindu subjectivity to be evoked.
Understanding how the changing social positioning of the gay male has enabled particular sexual practices or ‘sexualisations’ to occur is a sensitive affair that requires both an understanding of the political, social and medical discourses that embellish the symbol of the gay male in the cultural imaginary, and an understanding of the psychic process that determine how one psychosexually responds to and internalises information – as a gay male - that may influence their sexual desires and practices.
This paper attempts to satisfy the titular question through looking inward at psychoanalysis as a discipline, specifically the work of Melanie Klein, Freud, Bersani and Dean as well as outward towards the object of study: gay sexual risk. By examining the changing relational dynamic between the discipline and object of study, alongside a critical analysis of how psychoanalysis has - at different points - failed and succeeded in explaining gay desires for sexual risk; this paper hopes to offer an answer that speaks to: the ways in which psychoanalysis has changed in its approach to sexual risk; how it deals with modern actualisations of gay sexual risk, and how well its tools can blend with other forms of analysis in order to temper its own inabilities to account for such actualisations.