Text Box: I have deliberately waited some time before responding to the several emails addressing various points I raised in the essay, "Critical Criminology's Discontent: On the Perils of Publishing and the Call to Action." Let me first say how delighted I am to read the various comments generated from the essay. Sifting through the comments, it is abundantly clear to me that many of us do feel and live the profound difficulty of making a connection to a larger academic audience in which peace activism, praxis, social justice and humanism are at the center of criminological work. Having said this, I do want to comment on a few points. First, I think our struggle is not about defining what is "critical." Although a very useful philosophical exercise in its own right, I believe that this question puts the Division on the defensive and, unfortunately, diverts our attention from the matter at hand. Further, this is the kind of question I would anticipate from our noncritical colleagues. In other words, if we move to respond to our dilemma by first addressing the question: "what does it mean to engage in critical scholarship?" we, unknowingly and benignly, I think, endorse the "power" that our noncritical counterparts have to set the agenda for US in regard to potential dialogue, engagement, information, and social change. I wish to be clear that answering this question IS something we could (and over time should) refine, tweak, and massage; however, the "real" agenda is about acknowledging the breadth and depth of exclusion we confront and the corrosive and debilitating impact this has on our Division membership, future critical crim scholars/activists/students, and the overall relationship we have with the general criminological academic community. There is something of a fluid continuum of critical crim thought. Several of us have written about it; indeed, in the anthology, Social Justice/Criminal Justice I describe my take on the continuum in the book's Introduction. Rather than investing too much time massaging this point, I recommend that we embrace and celebrate the various intellectual strains of thought that constitute critical analysis. Granted, different people will disagree on what "exactly" is critical; however, I believe we also can say, with some confidence, that what tends to get published in prestigious criminological journals, regrettably fails to represent our divergent critical perspectives on crime, law, justice, society. Relatedly, as criminology settles into a sustained period of manipulating large data sets, it is not surprising that the discipline's mainstream journals would prefer studies endorsing the methodological assumptions of quantitative inquiry. We also know that many talented critical criminologists (e.g., Marty Schwartz, Meda Chesney Lind, Brian MacLean, and Walter DeKeseredy) employ statistical analysis in several of their research investigations. I applaud their efforts. We need to be careful, however, in how we frame the relationship between research methodology and critical criminology. Part of the problem many critical criminologists confront is that method is very intimately linked to a series of epistemological assumptions about agency, society, social change, sensemaking, identity and the like. But this IS our strength. Here, too, we want our noncritical colleagues to understand how a diversity of methods, anchored in different critical criminological perspectives, reveals Text Box: new and different insights about law, punishment, victimization, policing, judicial decision making, etc., in relation to agency, sensemaking, society, identity, and the like. As a division, if we understand and embrace our diversity (in terms of the continuum that represents critical thought, and in terms of research methods that inform our theoretical perspectives), I think we present a very potent "force,” if you will, to our noncritical colleagues symbolizing our strength at the discussion table. It is in this spirit that, I submit we must invite mainstream criminologists to explore with us how our Division's diversity advances ALL of our interests in furthering our regard for criminological/sociolegal knowledge. Thanks to you too. Let's keep the discussion alive. Let's change the culture, in which we write, teach, work, and live. Text Box: It is not whether work is "quantitative crap," or "postmodern crap," or "theoretical crap," it is whether the work helps us build an understanding that moves us, however limitedly, down a path toward an undistorted discourse on human justice.