Abstract
This paper explores the central role of documentary filmmaking as a methodological practice in contemporary criminology. It draws from cultural criminology to develop emerging, open-ended practices for conducting ethnographically inflected audiovisual research that crafts sensory knowledge from aesthetic experience. First, it demonstrates how documentary criminology is an ethnographic practice that embraces audiovisual technologies to inflect, render, and depict the aesthetics of material, sensory, and corporeal experiences of crime and transgression as knowledge production. Second, it explores a particular type of lived experience that John Dewey terms “aesthetic” to demonstrate the sorts of tangible and intangible entities that documentary criminology can interpret, record and depict as knowledge. To demonstrate this approach, the article employs a variety of examples from cultural criminology and from the documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China. The final part of the paper turns to an analysis of Mardi Gras: Made in China itself to illustrate the overlap of theory, methods, and reflexive practices of documentary criminology within four broad aesthetic domains: temporality, topography, corporeality, and the personal. The inclusion of documentary within an open-ended methodological sensibility, both as a mode of analysis and as a means of producing sensory knowledge, can expand the criminological imagination. Mardi Gras: Made in China (23 minutes select scenes) from David Redmon.
Highlights
The movement of bodies, how one embraces the camera as an extension of the body, where one places the camera, how one hears while recording, how one touches experience and becomes touched by experience, and how one embodies the dynamics of a situation: all these choices contribute to the crafting of a malleable aesthetic experience as a tacit sensibility
This essay has provided a methodological outline for documentary criminology that borrows from aspects of cultural criminology, ethnography, and Dewey’s notion of lived aesthetic experience
Ferrell and Sanders laid out a prospectus for what an emerging cultural criminology might look like
Summary
This article builds on previous research in visual criminology to demonstrate how an emerging “documentary criminology” actively interprets, crafts, and depicts lived experience with ethnographic sensibilities [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. Documentary criminology is the practice of using audiovisual methods to interpretively craft lived experience as media; it riffs on and extends cultural criminology’s exploration of the situated meaning of experiential crimes and transgressions in their wider context by producing experiences in the form of a documentary. Documentary criminology embraces an interpretive analysis of lived experience, and adds to written scholarship by actively producing and disseminating audiovisual experiences as sensorial knowledge to help shape a criminological imagination. By positioning documentary criminology as theoretically and methodologically informed by cultural criminology, I aim to connect its interpretive, craft-enterprise-based approach to a specific experiential strand of aesthetic pragmatism outlined by Dewey in Art as Experience [2]. Merging the interpretive tradition of verstehen in cultural criminology with the pragmatism of Dewey provides an ethnographic orientation to documentary criminology that explores and crafts aesthetic experience as an audiovisual method of inquiry. By reimagining experience as aesthetic—something people, objects, and animals expressively enact—criminologists can use audiovisual technologies to craft non-fiction expressive experience with similar vitality
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