This paper considers depictions of fraud in British true crime television programmes and focuses on three BBC programmes from the period 2019–2023: For Love or Money ; Scam Interceptors ; and Fraud Squad . We question if there is a pedagogical structure to the narratives of the programmes. Our analysis is attentive to the lasting influence of British Public Service Broadcasting traditions and the influence of the BBC’s Reith principles. The data emerging from our analysis reveals the tensions that emerge from the programmes’ stylistic attempts to remain attentive to the earliest aims of the BBC and Public Service Broadcasting. The paper argues that the three programmes present issues concerning fraud through the BBC’s overarching mission to inform, educate and entertain.

This article critically examines how the emotive experience of political imprisonment is represented in prison memoirs. Using the memoirs of former Irish Republican Army (IRA) members who were involved in prison-related protest in the 1970s and 80s as an empirical basis, it goes beyond surface level cultural reproductions (i.e. murals, songs, and posters) to explore how lived experience of political imprisonment is defined by a complex interplay between loyalty and guilt. The article identifies how the memoirists’ competing roles as IRA volunteers, comrades, sons, husbands, and brothers shaped their lived experience of political imprisonment. Establishing that loyalty and guilt are multi-faceted emotions that emerge out of different relationships, in different contexts and for different reasons, the article argues that nuanced conceptual differences must be acknowledged within, as well as between, these emotions. The article identifies how, for political prisoners at least, loyalty means dedication to collective action, the relegation of self-interest, and fidelity to dead comrades, whereas guilt manifest itself as feelings of benefiting from the sacrifice of dead comrades, recognising their capacity to hurt others, and attempts to belatedly repair past hurt. These insights are instructive in understanding both the historical legacy of political imprisonment and its contemporaneous impact in a global climate of increasing political polarisation and violent unrest.

Scholars, national security officials, and top law enforcement officers continue to argue that far-right extremism represents one of the most pressing forms of terrorism in the United States. Despite this, the current scholarship on far-right extremism is lagging, particularly in regard to the non-violent activities of these groups like music. Of the research that does exist, few examine these activities through a critical gendered lens despite the ideology of far-right groups that highlights strict stereotypical gender roles. As such, this study attempts to understand how far-right music is used to construct femininity and masculinity and then, how gender relates to extremism. Using lyrics from over 700 songs from 64 geographically diverse far-right bands, we analyzed the gendered narrative that emerges in the music. We find a strikingly divergent narrative in terms of women and femininity. In-group women are held in high regards as they are the only ones biologically able to continue the pure bloodline. Out-group women are viewed as whores, who lure in-group men away from the group’s morals and goals. The narrative around men and masculinity centers on strength, toughness, and a profound sense of brotherhood that will ensure the white race prevails. With this gendered picture, we highlight the influential, though often overlooked, role that women play in sustaining far-right movements. Although not as visible as their male counterparts, women within these groups exert considerable influence as mothers and wives in maintaining far-right prescribed family structures, cultural values, and community cohesion.

This study examines how psychedelic drug users construct symbolic boundaries to differentiate themselves from other drug users. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews with people who have used psychedelic drugs, we explore how participants construct their psychedelic use as distinct from, and superior to, other forms of drug use. Participants differentiate themselves from “hard” drug users in two main ways. First, by emphasizing psychedelics’ perceived lack of addictive potential and reduced harm. Second, by focusing on the perceived legitimacy of their use, frequently citing mental health, therapeutic, and experiential benefits. Psychedelic users contrast their experiences with those of other drug users, in part, by valuing psychedelics as facilitating meaningful, introspective, and emotionally significant experiences rather than mere intoxication. These symbolic boundaries serve to sustain their use while shielding them from broader drug-related stigmas. The present study offers a novel example of boundary construction, a discussion of these findings conceptually, and elucidates least some of the reasons for persistent psychedelic use and how those who use psychedelics view themselves.

This article explores the courthouse as a socio-temporal threshold, where past harms are rearticulated and future outcomes are yet uncertain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two Swedish district courts, the study examines how courthouse architectures and atmospheres structure experiences of anticipation, uncertainty, and emotional dissonance for those navigating criminal trials. Drawing on sensory approaches within criminology, the analysis traces how courthouses materialize legal neutrality through affective absences (e.g. emotional restraint, sterile design) and spectral presences (e.g. punitive iconography, historical residues). The article shows how courthouses are not merely sites for adjudication, but charged environments that both manifest and obscure enduring hierarchies and tensions around justice; on individual as well as structural levels. In doing so, the article reconceptualizes the courthouse as a socio-legal space that collapses binaries of public/private, presence/absence, and past/future—offering new insights into how justice is imagined, encountered, and spatially embodied in legal spaces.

This special issue addresses the need for a critical and collective response to the growing hostility faced by queer and trans people worldwide, and to the expansion of state, legal, and techno-social control over contra-normative modes of gendered and sexual life. In this editor’s introduction, we reflect on the provocation offered in the title of this special issue— Queer Matters in Criminology —and situate this collection’s development within its social, intellectual, and institutional context. We foreground the importance of a queer criminology that challenges criminological spaces to become more explicitly anti-normative and politically radical, and to foster alliances and coalitions in defence of queer and trans lives. At a time when queer and trans research is being vilified, criminalised, surveilled, and censored by state institutions across the globe, spaces where that knowledge can be generated, shared, and defended are as vital as ever.

As a nascent sub-discipline, queer criminology has been fundamentally concerned with questions about its identity and scope. Within these debates, several scholars have argued that queer criminology’s central purpose is to correct the discipline’s long-standing neglect of LGBTQ people’s experiences. However, queer criminology has predominantly addressed this neglect by focusing on the experiences of queer research subjects rather than queer researchers. By examining the experiences of three queer researchers conducting anti-queer violence research, this article explores the deeply affective nature of queer criminological work and its implications for contemporary debates about queering the field. It contends that queer research relies on the interconnectedness of intellectual and affective engagement with its subject matter in ways that challenge the discipline’s conventionally masculinist approach to knowledge production. Yet, it also shows that affective investments in queer criminological research are not inherently emancipatory—they can also entangle researchers in the same structures of domination and extraction that their work seeks to resist. On this basis, the article argues that queering criminology requires more than merely incorporating queer experiences into the discipline. It also demands recognising, activating, and engaging critically with the uniquely affective character of those experiences, including those of researchers themselves.