The History of (Crime) Ethnography

This chapter provides a broad overview of the history and use of ethnography as a tool for studying crime and deviance. It traces the development of ethnographic methods, including participant observation, from ancient times to the present, exploring how early-twentieth-century anthropologists and sociologists, First and Second Chicago School ethnographers, and scholars from a variety of intellectual traditions have shaped, problematized, and codified ethnography—leaving us with some of the most canonical studies of crime and deviance in the process. This chapter serves as an historical steppingstone for the remainder of the handbook, highlighting some of the most influential people, places, studies, and movements that have shaped how contemporary crime ethnographers understand and practice their craft.

Living on the pilgrimage

There are some pilgrims who live permanently as homeless itinerants on the route. They are often viewed negatively as beggars who are only doing the pilgrimage to solicit alms and avoid work. However, this chapter presents a more nuanced picture, showing that while some itinerant pilgrims beg and succumb to drink and theft, others lead disciplined ascetic lives. It presents case studies of homeless itinerants who have lived for many years on the pilgrimage, from one who turned to drinking and theft, to an ascetic Buddhist practitioner who eschewed alcohol, to a famous fugitive from the law who had a devoted group of supporters and a colourful history of crime, and whose dualistic nature as a revered pilgrim and infamous felon encapsulates the contradictory dimensions of itinerant pilgrims in Shikoku.

Experts of the streets: The thoughts of experts by experience with a history of crime and substance abuse on working as a team with professionals

Expertise by experience has become increasingly significant in the various fields of social work. This study examines narratives told by experts by experience who have undergone an educational expert-by-experience program for people with a history of crime and substance abuse, with the main focus on the participants’ accounts of their expertise and how it is created when working as a team with a professional. The stories create an image of the expert by experience as an agent who is both an interpreter and an advocate advancing the mutual understanding between the client and the professional as well as someone who promotes the client’s status within the service system. However, the experts’ dual role makes it difficult for them to fully recognize their status and roles in the professional organizations. All in all, the study shows that expertise by experience has much use in social and personal services, including probation.

Creative Methodologies for a Mobile Criminology: Walking as Critical Pedagogy

In this article, we build upon research that combines walking as a research method alongside participatory and biographical research to teach criminology and generate criminological knowledge and understanding in sensory and corporeal ways. We argue for a mobile criminology that attends to space, place, and time to analyse theories and concepts in criminology, as well as to undertake and apply research. In this article we share a biographical walk with David Honeywell, a convict criminologist, and two examples of criminological walks as pedagogic methods. We suggest that through walking (as a teaching, learning, and research method) we are able to get in touch with the past, present, and future of crime, justice, and punishment in ways that foster knowledge and ‘understanding’ in corporeal, relational, and material ways forming a critical, cultural, mobile pedagogy. Walking through the city, engaging with spaces, places, and stories associated with crime, is a way of seeing and feeling the history of crime, justice, and punishment in the present, as well as offering critical and imaginative methods for doing criminology in societies on the move.

Criminal Moves

This book offers a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about crime fiction. Academic studies in the genre have historically been encumbered by a set of restrictive preconceptions, largely drawn from attitudes to popular fiction: that the genre does not warrant detailed critical analysis; that genre norms and conventions matter more than textual individuality; and that comparative or transnational perspectives are secondary to the study of the core British-American canon. This study challenges the distinction between literary and popular fiction and proposes that crime fiction, far from being static and staid, must be seen as a genre constantly violating its own boundaries. Centred on three axes of mobility, the essays present new, mobile reading practices that realize the genre’s full textual complexity, without being limited by the authoritative self-interpretations that crime narratives tend to provide. The book demonstrates how we can venture beyond the restrictive notions of ‘genre’, ‘formula’, ‘popular’ or ‘lowbrow’ to develop instead a concept of genre that acknowledges its mobility. Finally, it establishes a global and transnational perspective that challenges the centrality of the British-American tradition and recognizes that the global history of crime fiction is characterized, not by the existence of parallel, national traditions, but rather by processes of appropriation and transculturation.