cultural criminology
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2021 ◽  
pp. 209-227
Author(s):  
Jeff Ferrell

This chapter explores the many dynamics linking cultural criminology and ethnography and outlines the distinctive features of cultural criminological ethnography. The chapter first notes the ethnographic sensibility on which cultural criminology is constructed and summarizes some of the foundational ethnographies in cultural criminology. It next documents the dynamic interplay between ethnography and theory in cultural criminology, especially in regard to the concept of verstehen. The chapter then considers ethnographic innovations in cultural criminology, among them instant ethnography, liquid ethnography, visual ethnography, and autoethnography. A larger innovation is also explicated: cultural criminological employment of ethnography as an alternative epistemology within criminology, and a methodological critique of conventional criminological research. The chapter concludes with two discussions: cultural criminology’s use of ethnographic research findings as counterpoint and corrective to harmful criminal justice policies, and the trajectory of cultural criminological ethnography as it increasingly engages with interdisciplinary approaches, and explores issues of absence, drift, and ephemerality.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Margaret Smith

<div>Contributing to the dynamic and interdisciplinary field of cultural criminology, this project works to emphasize the destructive, modern forces of consumerism and violence within Toronto’s crime-news industry. The paper fuses the canonical and emerging methodologies of content analysis, discourse analysis, and liquid ethnography, to evaluate the framing and editing techniques used to relay the story of Bruce McArthur’s predations in The Village (over the 2018 news year). A sample of 365 articles, retrieved from five print media sources, are methodically examined to understand both the local and national agenda-setting strategies of contemporary journalism. Actively contributing to the transformation of human suffering and violence into mass-market pleasure, a carnival of crime model (Presdee, 2000) serves as a primary lens for evaluating the hyper-sensationalized reporting styles of modern news makers. Weaving theoretical contributions from the fields of sociology and media studies, the embeddedness of heteronormative, racialized, and ethnocentric tropes common to the news and crime-infotainment industries is also critically evaluated towards raising greater political and social accountability. Crime-centric podcasts are further identified as a leading technological medium for fueling public obsessions with murder and transgressions. Formed by enthusiastic hobbyists and motivated journalists, the producers of podcasting content hastily straddle the realms of entertainment and information sharing. As such, this research calls for immediate awareness and tending to the neoliberal symptoms of boredom and fear existing in our modern world, building on Stanley Cohen’s (1972) moral panic theory.</div><div><br></div><div>Keywords: cultural criminology, serial killer, news media, crime infotainment, McArthur<br></div>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Margaret Smith

<div>Contributing to the dynamic and interdisciplinary field of cultural criminology, this project works to emphasize the destructive, modern forces of consumerism and violence within Toronto’s crime-news industry. The paper fuses the canonical and emerging methodologies of content analysis, discourse analysis, and liquid ethnography, to evaluate the framing and editing techniques used to relay the story of Bruce McArthur’s predations in The Village (over the 2018 news year). A sample of 365 articles, retrieved from five print media sources, are methodically examined to understand both the local and national agenda-setting strategies of contemporary journalism. Actively contributing to the transformation of human suffering and violence into mass-market pleasure, a carnival of crime model (Presdee, 2000) serves as a primary lens for evaluating the hyper-sensationalized reporting styles of modern news makers. Weaving theoretical contributions from the fields of sociology and media studies, the embeddedness of heteronormative, racialized, and ethnocentric tropes common to the news and crime-infotainment industries is also critically evaluated towards raising greater political and social accountability. Crime-centric podcasts are further identified as a leading technological medium for fueling public obsessions with murder and transgressions. Formed by enthusiastic hobbyists and motivated journalists, the producers of podcasting content hastily straddle the realms of entertainment and information sharing. As such, this research calls for immediate awareness and tending to the neoliberal symptoms of boredom and fear existing in our modern world, building on Stanley Cohen’s (1972) moral panic theory.</div><div><br></div><div>Keywords: cultural criminology, serial killer, news media, crime infotainment, McArthur<br></div>


Author(s):  
Eleni Dimou

Cultural criminology places crime and its control within the realm of culture. Namely, it sees crime and crime control as social constructs or as cultural products; that is, their meaning is defined by the existing power relations of the social and cultural context of which they are part. As such, cultural criminology focuses on understanding how the meanings of crime, justice, and crime control are constructed, enforced, contested, and resisted within an increasingly globalized socioeconomic and cultural context. This is the context of late modernity where capitalism continues to infiltrate one community after the other, transforming people into consumers and experiences; emotions, life, and nature into consumer products. It is a context of transnational networks of flows of people, capital, goods, and images, where identities, communities, politics, and culture are increasingly constructed through the media and the Internet. There is a growing enmeshment of human communities—signified by the term globalization—in a way that events in one part of the world increasingly affect the other, and which make all the more evident perpetuating inequalities between Global North and South, as well as increasing marginality, exploitation, and exclusion of minorities within Global North and South. Simultaneously it is a world with effervescent potential for creativity, political activism, resistance, transcendence, and recuperation. This is briefly the context of late modernity within which cultural criminology endeavors to understand how perceptions about crime, justice, and crime control come to be constructed, enforced, and contested. Cultural criminology adopts a triadic framework of analysis whereby it bridges the macro level of power (i.e., capitalism, patriarchy, racism, anthropocentrism, imperialism) to that of the meso level of culture (i.e., art forms, media, subcultures, knowledge, discourse) and the micro level of everyday life and emotions. Through this intertwined exploration of the macro, the meso, and the micro in the globally connected world of late modernity, cultural criminology embraces a highly interdisciplinary and critical stance that grants it a particular international edge, as it is attuned to contemporary issues that affect communities locally and internationally. Cultural criminology’s international edge, for example, is depicted in challenging globally established forms of criminological knowledge production, which are dictated by state definitions of crime and “law and order”-oriented policies. These definitions and their accompanying policies omit harms committed by the powerful or the state itself along with everyday life experiences of and with crime. The call for a cultural criminology is one of resistance to these dominant forms of knowledge that reinforce and legitimize the status quo at local, national, and international levels. It is a call that aims to reorient criminology to contemporary and perpetuating manifestations of power, inequalities, and resistance within the contemporary context of late modernity and globalization. To do so though, cultural criminology should also be more reflexive on its positionality within the realm of knowledge, as it represents largely a Global North perspective. As such, it should extend its attentiveness to forms of knowledge and perspectives stemming from the Global South and should seek to be critiqued from and open a dialogue with Southern and non-Western decolonial perspectives.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136248062110282
Author(s):  
Ummni Khan

This article draws on governance theory, critical theory and cultural criminology to interrogate how legal, social scientific and feminist discourses converge to construct rap music as a pressing social problem. While each discourse has its own preoccupations, ideologies and internal contestation, the overarching message is that rap music is a potential source of danger that conveys anti-social attitudes. Suspicion is sometimes also cast on musicians themselves. While I compare three overlapping fields, the ultimate purpose is to problematize the supposedly progressive approach to interpreting and mobilizing against songs deemed harmful. Significantly, I argue that much of the social science scholarship and feminist activism that addresses hip hop music perpetuates anti-Black stereotypes and dovetails with repressive state apparatuses. Among other things, social science and feminist criticism of rap hermeneutically support the use of rap lyrics as evidence of criminality—a distinctly non-progressive, racialized legal practice.


Author(s):  
David Rodríguez Goyes ◽  
Mireya Astroina Abaibira ◽  
Pablo Baicué ◽  
Angie Cuchimba ◽  
Deisy Tatiana Ramos Ñeñetofe ◽  
...  

AbstractThis exploratory study develops a “southern green cultural criminology” approach to the prevention of environmental harms and crimes. The main aim is to understand differing cultural representations of nature, including wildlife, present within four Colombian Indigenous communities to evaluate whether they encourage environmentally friendly human interactions with the natural world, and if so, how. The study draws on primary data gathered by the Indigenous authors (peer researchers) of this article via a set of interviews with representatives of these four communities. We argue that the cosmologies that these communities live by signal practical ways of achieving ecological justice and challenging anthropocentrism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174165902110306
Author(s):  
Murray Lee

The first half of this article makes that case for, and develops, a preliminary conceptual framework for a ‘musicriminology’. A response to recent provocations for a more sensorially orientated criminology, and more general appeals for cultural criminology to engage rigorously with popular music and sound, a musicriminology could constitute significant contribution to the cultural criminological field. The article proposes two key conceptual themes, culture and co-production that underpin such a framework. Into these broad ( Double-C) themes are incorporated theories of the cultural, material, aesthetics, sonics, and the sensorial. The second half of the article uses drill music, a subset of rap or hip-hop music, as a case study. The focus is on the popular western Sydney drill group OneFour, who have recently been subject to police attempts to suppress them on the basis that their lyrics ‘incite violence’. With dark, nihilistic and sometimes violent lyrics typically narrating street life, drill is often characterised by performers’ relationship to place –groups are sometimes even named after their postcode. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia drill music has attracted the attention of police, politicians, and mainstream media for artists’ alleged relationship to street-based violence. The article suggests that OneFour’s music challenges an accepted aesthetic and cultural order. However, somewhat ironically the group has become more popular as a result of police attempts to criminalise them and to re-assert such an order.


2021 ◽  
pp. 561-589
Author(s):  
Steve Case ◽  
Phil Johnson ◽  
David Manlow ◽  
Roger Smith ◽  
Kate Williams

This chapter investigates critical criminology. The strands that are widely regarded as most important in the development of critical criminology are labelling perspectives, Marxist-inspired critical theories, power perspectives, and feminist perspectives. The ideas and insights contained within these theories inspired and prepared the ground for more recent developments in the field, including cultural criminology and convict criminology. Critical criminology not only suggests that we make small alterations to criminal justice systems; instead, it requires us to question everything we think we ‘know’ about these systems and the societies and communities in which we live. It questions how and why we control behaviour, looks at power from the perspective of the oppressed or the powerless, and suggests alternative narratives that should be part of our accepted knowledge base.


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