The "Accidental Criminologist"

Luis FernandezLuis Fernandez: Ph.D

Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Compliments make Dr. Luis Fernandez uncomfortable, and this modesty extends to his most recent accolade--that of receiving NAU's 2010 Research and Creative Activity Award for Most Promising Scholar. Yet there's no question that Fernandez deserves this award: for one thing, his level of productivity is simply mind-boggling (in just the past three years, Fernandez has published three books and twelve scholarly articles and book chapters). Like most academics, Fernandez admits that he barely has time to breathe, but attributes his high level of productivity to the passion that he has for this work. "Once I get into that space [of pursuing my passion] . . .it is very easy to just not stop working. I think you have got to do what your passion says. You have to find what it is and do that, and I think that's the key." Fernandez' passion for his work is not only an intellectual passion but also a passion for his personal sense of what is right, and to identify and name injustices in the world. "I think that what happened to me is that around about 26 or 27 years old, I recognized that [this passion] just wasn't going to go away, and so I [decided] to surrender to it. And as soon as I did that, boy did it make an entire difference . . .everything just made sense in my life."

Fernandez's curriculum vitae shows not only an abundance of academic accomplishments but also of activist endeavors. About his approach to activist scholarship, Fernandez says:

"In my book, Policing Dissent: Social Control and the Anti-globalization Movement, I adopted a methodology where I intentionally blurred activism and scholarship. . .for me anyway, understanding really requires experience. It allows me insight into a thinking process or a process of control that I can't gain if I'm not in those spaces. So for that book, I wanted to study anti-globalization movement, and so I participated and did research simultaneously. I wanted to write from a perspective of police batons and bullets - rubber bullets, of course - coming in my direction. I thought it might be interesting to see what kinds of experiences the mind begins to have as it gets into these very intense protest situations because that might give me insight in terms of how control of a protestor begins to occur, how those processes begin to work. And in my opinion, the methodology worked pretty well because it gave me that particular perspective."

At the root of this passion is the theme that, Fernandez says, runs through everything he does, and that is the dynamic between control and resistance. "It's the dynamics between oppression and liberation. It's the power dynamic of oppressor and oppressed. Even my work on methodological approach is in trying to understand the dynamics between being a privileged professor and studying an unprivileged group of people and understanding how that operates."

Despite his keen sense for finding the right methodology to answer research questions about complex human systems, Dr. Fernandez insists that getting to where he is now was not necessarily intentional. "There was no trajectory to my career; it was just a series of falling ass backwards. . .the career only makes sense historically and looking back, trying to force a narrative to it. When I'm in it, it just makes no sense at all but there are definite themes that come out of my work."

That lack of trajectory has led Dr. Fernandez to study anarchist thought. Last year he was a speaker on a community panel titled "Anarchist Authors in Northern Arizona." This use of anarchist theory in his work comes out of his past inability to ground his deep critiques of the Nicaraguan revolution that altered the direction of his family's life forever. Indeed, his disappointment in the outcome of the 1978-79 Revolution, which simply resulted in the replacement of one oppressing system by another, was better informed by his discovery of anarchist thought. "The classical anarchist thought began to help me explain that if you are not careful with certain human organizations, they tend to reproduce certain hierarchical relationships that end up reproducing these tendencies for human control." But Dr. Fernandez is not attracted to the violent side of anarchy, "To me, anarchism is about participation and deep democracy, mutual aid, and autonomy, which are principles that almost all Americans can embrace generally."

Not only has anarchism informed Dr. Fernandez's work, but he has translated those elements into an effective teaching strategy. He notes that the acceptance and understanding of big ideas is something that is difficult to do in a hierarchical, coercive environment and so he brings the anarchy-related concepts of participation, mutual aid, and autonomy to the classroom directly. "The first thing that I do in my class is tell my students, 'Ok folks, everything on this syllabus is negotiable, everything.' It doesn't mean that [they] can change everything, but if it's fair, if it's just, and we can all agree to that, then I am open to any changes that [students] want to do."

This bold approach is not unique to Dr. Fernandez's teaching style, but there are still considerations that must be taken into account when relinquishing power in the classroom. "You have to be open to critique, you have to be able to accept critique and not take it personally, which begins to set the tone to the class about what debate is. Because if they criticize you and you don't take it personally, then they're not going to take it personally when you criticize them, or rather their ideas. Because you can say, 'Hey you don't need to take this personally because we are just debating ideas. I'm not debating your values.'" Applying these principles to his own classroom organization helps students to better grasp the complex concepts that Fernandez teaches. "I find that if the ideas live in the classroom they become much more powerful."