Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) (2014) The Poetics of Crime Understanding and Researching Crime and Deviance Through Creative Sources

Abstract

Neoliberalism, market policies, and competition have created challenges to security governance after 9/11 (Ferguson, 2017). The proliferating scientific republic and increasing securitisation have bolstered new knowledge claims over the idea of crime, and have given rise to different orientations and methods to craft an understanding of crime. ‘The Poetics of Crime’ can be seen as a rigorous attempt that departs from the notion of thoughtfully ‘cultivated beliefs’ and carefully ‘nurtured debated attempts’ being the outcome of postmodernity’s claims of safety, security and surveillance. Proliferating security fetishism thus promoting ‘criminological society’ produces different sets of knowledge on crime. Methodological cynicism and beliefs have whirled the existing preconditions of defining crime through logical positivism and syllogism, opening up new avenues to develop knowledge to define contemporaneous of crime. The book under review attempts to transcend and criticise conventional methods of understanding crime and find creative ways to define crime. With shifting approaches to theorising crime, and significant shifts in policing practices, there is a pressing need to adopt a more egalitarian approach to understand crime through public criminology (Loader, 2000; Loader and Sparks, 2011). The book is divided into four sections. It offers a rich critique of existing methodological issues and the influences of bureaucratic practices on criminology, while attempting to study the antecedents of crime through new approaches to understanding art forms. In their criminological perspectives, scholars highlight the significance of ‘fact in fiction’ for building an understanding of crime.