Cultural Criminology Research Articles

Three burglars, a friendly police inspector, and a vegetarian fox: Scandinavian exceptionalism, children’s literature, and desistance-conducive cultures

ABSTRACT This article draws connections between cultural criminology, the Scandinavian penal exceptionalism literature and desistance research by taking a close look at two Norwegian children’s books published in the 1950s. I argue that both books are fundamentally desistance stories and that their enduring success should be seen, at least in part, as a result of their articulation of broader cultural values that Norwegian parents have seen (and continue to see) as important to communicate to their children. Both books highlight redemption and forgiveness as important values. I also argue that because they have become part of the Norwegian literary canon, they continue to act as arenas for the reproduction of these values. These books may, therefore, be seen as both exhibiting and reproducing what we may call a desistance-conducive ‘culture of second chances’.

The Portrayal of Violence in the Re-enactment-based Crime Shows: A Case Study of Jurm Bolta Hai and Crime Patrol

This research study examines the content of re-enactment-based crime shows to understand how violence-based crime events are portrayed to the viewers. Quantitative Content Analysis has been executed by the researchers on the two leading T.V.shows of Pakistan and India – Jurm Bolta Hai and Crime Patrol. All the episodes of the selected shows on-aired from the 1st of November 2016 to the 31st of December 2016 have been studied, coded, and analyzed.The findings reveal that Crime Patrol on-aired more episodes and showed more violence. The data confirmed that both the shows discussed the crime events in a similar line by focusing on the murder,kidnapping, and robbery. There is a space for improvement in the language of both the shows to tell the crime story to the audience in a more decent way. It is also much needed that Jurm Bolta Hai should respect the privacy of different characters involved or affected by the crime. The findings of this research study are grounded in the Cultural Criminology Theory.

Risky, Subversive, and Deviant? A Criminological Analysis of Guerrilla Knitting

Guerrilla knitting, otherwise known as yarn bombing, is a form of graffiti or street art that has grown in popularity and prevalence over the past decade. Whilst other forms of street art and graffiti have drawn interest from criminologists, much less has been written about the cultures of, and responses to, those who engage in knitting graffiti. Examining the phenomenon through the lens of cultural criminology, and drawing on empirical research with yarn bombers, this paper critically analyses the ways in which guerrilla knitting has been framed as a risky, subversive, and deviant activity. In doing so, the paper considers important questions about exceptionalism, the aesthetics of authority, and the commodification of deviance.

Toward a carnivalesque analysis of hacking: A qualitative study of Iranian hackers

This study sought to analyze Iranian hackers’ lived experiences based on the concept of the carnival of crime in cultural criminology. Fifty-four in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with young hackers. Moreover, their behaviors were observed along with those of other hackers. The data were coded through a thematic analysis using MAXQDA software. The study's findings indicated that cyberspace had created a carnivalesque utopia that allowed the young Iranian hackers to experience the pleasure of crime. By trespassing the rational frameworks of the modern world and altering the trends of knowledge creation as a means for subjugation, Iranian hackers contribute to the meaning-construction policies of those in power and challenge authoritarian aesthetics by invading their electronic domain. It was also found that the carnivalesque lives of hackers provided them with a variety of opportunities for disrupting the rhythms of production and creating an underground carnivalesque economy based on their level of knowledge.

Experiencing Relative Deprivation as True Crime: Applying Cultural Criminology to the Qanon Superconspiracy Theory

This essay builds upon earlier studies of the QAnon superconspiracy theory by applying cultural criminology as a framework to investigate the significance of QAnon and the events that facilitated the rise of the superconspiracy and the associated political movement. QAnon has had multiple impacts that should be of interest to criminologists. In the United States, QAnon was involved with the 2020 election, as adherents believed messages posted by "Q" referred to President Trump as a messiah and Trump tacitly acknowledged the group. In addition, QAnon has international influence, most recently in the "trucker" convoy in Canada and anti-vaccine protests in New Zealand and Germany. This essay utilizes cultural criminology to introduce the framework of relative deprivation theory and emphasize the importance of the gaze from above and below in structuring relative deprivation. In addition, we discuss the role of cultural understandings of victimization in shaping ideology and physical frameworks used by QAnon.

Culture of Abuse of Power Due to Conflict of Interest to Corruption for Too Long on The Management form Resources of Oil and Gas in Indonesia

This research is a culture of abuse of power due to conflicts of interest so that corruption takes too long to manage oil and natural gas resources in Indonesia in managing oil and natural gas resources in Indonesia. The problem of this research is that the Indonesian state is equipped with abundant natural resources, including oil and natural gas resources. According to Article 33 of the 1945 Constitution, the oil and natural gas resources should be controlled by the state for the greatest prosperity of the people. In fact, the Indonesian people are not prosperous despite the abundance of oil and natural gas resources. Historical research methods. With the concept of cultural criminology. The results of research since the independence of the Republic of Indonesia have occurred abuse of power due to conflicts of interest to maintain power in the management of oil and gas with corruption impacting state losses, especially the suffering of the Indonesian people for too long, so that a culture of corruption is formed. This happens first; the sudden change component, caused by global changes and the modernization of the tendency of society to comply with materialism and consumerism while ignoring the cultural values of shame in the life of the nation and state. that is not trustworthy towards people's trust. This renewal of research re-shames cultural morality and limits the extent of power that

Walking, Talking, Imagining: Ethical Engagement with Sex Workers

ABSTRACT This article describes a walking interview with a sex worker who is an advocate for sex worker rights in Ireland. Walking interviews have been proposed as a biographical method which can be used to explore the relationship between personal concerns and public questions, and the method is characterised by mobile, relational and embodied practice (O’Neill and Roberts [2019. Walking Methods: Research on the Move. London: Routledge]). Walking with research participants addresses the power imbalances inherent in interviews, striving for ethical praxis, by allowing a shared perspective and a shared sensory experience. Together we investigate the ethics of sex work research, allyship and education, and we consider ways to strengthen alliances between sex working and non-sex working feminists. Opportunities for social justice for sex workers are considered, and a radical democratic imaginary is proposed, where sex workers are afforded full citizenship of an inclusive society. This imaginary follows work by O’Neill [2010. “Cultural Criminology and Sex Work: Resisting Regulation Through Radical Democracy and Participatory Action Research PAR.” Journal of Law and Society 37 (1): 210–232], O’Neill and Seal [2012. Transgressive Imaginations: Crime, Deviance and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan] and FitzGerald, O’Neill, and Wylie [2020b. “Social Justice for Sex Workers as a ‘Politics of Doing’: Research, Policy and Practice.” Irish Journal of Sociology 28 (3): 257–279], who have imagined full participation for sex workers in civic, political and social spheres. Starting with a radical openness to and acceptance of each other, as well as a firm dedication to bodily autonomy and social justice for all, we propose a path towards this imagined society.

Green Criminology and Rhetoric of Public Opinion: Online Commenting on Gas Rigs Near Israel's Coast

ABSTRACT This study identifies the key themes in online commenting on news reports about gas rig placements near Israel’s coastline. We employed an inductive thematic analysis to study 1276 comments and three main themes emerged from the analysis: (a) views on protesting against the rigs; (b) criminal labels; and (c) dangers of nearshore rigs. Although the majority of the comments supported the protest against the rigs, there was no consensus. The commenters who supported the protest described the acts that lead to environmental harm as criminal, deviant and corrupt. They also criticized the Israeli government and considered capital-government relations as the driving mechanism to place the rigs near the coast. The discussion addresses the meanings of the themes in the context of green cultural criminology, rhetorical strategies, including politics of definitions and causes, the rhetoric of rectitude and rationality, domain statements, and Aristotle’s rhetoric framework (logos, pathos, and ethos).

Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century

Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century

A guilty pleasure: The legal, social scientific and feminist verdict against rap

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.

Southern Green Cultural Criminology and Environmental Crime Prevention: Representations of Nature Within Four Colombian Indigenous Communities

This 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.

This Is Not a Drill: Towards a Sonic and Sensorial Musicriminology

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.

The poverty of the comparative orthodoxy: Cultural criminology, perspectival realism and conceptual variation

Comparative criminology has long struggled with the concept and object of culture while advances in culturally oriented criminologies have been ignored. Likewise, culturalists have ignored attempts at comparison for transcending milieu and are mired by theoretical and methodological eclecticism. Comparative criminology will benefit from engaging with conceptualisations of culture found in culturalist works and culturally oriented criminologies will benefit from an expanded focus beyond localised contexts to reveal and grapple with greater varieties of (sub)cultural variation. After bringing a qualified cultural criminology to comparative criminology I draw on the philosophy of science known as perspectival realism to address some epistemological and methodological problems in each camp. I argue an interpretive comparative criminology focused in identifying and generating conceptual variation is better suited to understand and grapple with the political-cultural dramatisations that are indicated by the statistical data of interest to those wedded to the comparative, nomothetic orthodoxy.

Policing the Pedal Rebels: A Case Study of Environmental Activism Under COVID-19

Australia, along with nation-states internationally, has entered a new phase of environmentally focused activism, with globalised, coordinated and social media–enabled environmental social movements seeking to address human-induced climate change and related issues such as the mass extinction of species and land clearing. Some environmental protest groups such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) have attracted significant political, media and popular commentary for their sometimes theatrical and disruptive forms of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. Drawing on green and cultural criminology, this article constitutes an autoethnographic account of environmental protest during the final stages of the initial COVID-19 lockdown in NSW, Australia. It takes as a case study a small protest by an XR subgroup called the Pedal Rebels. The article explores the policing of environmental protest from an activist standpoint, highlighting the extraordinary police resources and powers mobilised to regulate a small peaceful group of ‘socially distanced’ protesters operating within the existing public health orders. It places an autoethnographic description of this protest in the context of policing practice and green and cultural criminology. Additionally, it outlines the way in which such policing is emboldened by changes to laws affecting environmental protest, making activism an increasingly risky activity.

Free Mo Robinson: citizen engagement in response to a crime event on social media

ABSTRACT The growth of digital culture has opened up new spaces of engagement where interactive users discuss social issues, including crime. Given crime’s ubiquity in popular culture, cultural criminologists argue that diverse emotional involvement with crime in popular cultural texts, such as social media, provides important insights into how citizens comprehend issues related to crime. Here, an analysis of emotion should be placed into the foreground (Hayward, K., and J. Young. 2004. “Cultural Criminology: Some Notes on the Script.” Theoretical Criminology 8 (3): 259–273). Taking this as a cue to explore these often neglected popular moral and emotional aspects of crime, this article focuses on constructions of popular crime discourses, using citizens’ responses to the Mo Robinson people smuggling case on Facebook as a case study. Applying multimodal critical discourse analysis and a framework for analysing evaluation, we reveal ideological themes through which participants judge crime, perpetrator and victims. Our analysis of the Free Mo Robinson Facebook page demonstrates that although social media has the potential to challenge and shift traditional narratives about crime, it can also perpetuate and amplify ideological narratives of crime control that fail to address the wider socio-political and structural contexts in which crime occurs.

Social Research about Online Crime: Key Global Paradigms and the State of Research in Lithuania

This paper analyses key differences between two paradigms dominant in social research on online crime: the more prevalent neopositivist paradigm and the more recent critical–cultural paradigm. Based on an extensive analysis of up-to-date literature, the key paradigmatic oppositions in online crime research encompass: 1) in neopositivism, the conceptual separation of technological and social practices, the reliance on rational choice approaches in theory, especially routine activity theory, and the tendency towards quantitative research methods; 2) in the critical–cultural paradigm, a complex and context-dependent approach to the technosocial as a continuum, theoretical roots in critical theory, cultural criminology, actor-network theory, and feminist theory, and the emphasis on qualitative methods. The field of online crime research in Lithuania is dominated by legal studies, while social research is rare and fragmented. The existing social research of online crime in Lithuania lacks a solid theoretical basis in either paradigm. Methodologically, there are examples of both quantitative (surveys, analysis of registered crime statistics) and qualitative studies (interviews, discussion groups, content analysis). However, most of the studies are small-scale and their scarcity makes it nearly impossible to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and complimentary potential of each approach in the specific national and regional context.

Policing the Pedal Rebels: A Case Study of Environmental Activism Under COVID-19

Australia, along with nation-states internationally, has entered a new phase of environmentally focused activism, with globalised, coordinated and social media-enabled environmental social movements seeking to address human-induced climate change and related issues such as the mass extinction of species and land clearing. Some environmental protest groups such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) have attracted significant political, media and popular commentary for their sometimes theatrical and disruptive forms of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. Drawing on green and cultural criminology, this article constitutes an autoethnographic account of environmental protest during the final stages of the initial COVID-19 lockdown in NSW, Australia. It takes as a case study a small protest by an XR subgroup called the Pedal Rebels. The article explores the policing of environmental protest from an activist standpoint, highlighting the extraordinary police resources and powers mobilised to regulate a small peaceful group of 'socially distanced' protesters operating within the existing public health orders. It places an autoethnographic description of this protest in the context of policing practice and green and cultural criminology. Additionally, it outlines the way in which such policing is emboldened by changes to laws affecting environmental protest, making activism an increasingly risky activity. © The Author(s) 2021.

A New Approach for Researching Victims: The ‘Strength-Growth-Resilience’ Framework

Abstract This paper proposes a new framework for researching victims that blends appreciative inquiry methods used by prison researchers with narrative interview methods used by desistance researchers to investigate victim ‘strength-growth-resilience’. Alongside established victimological concerns with the extent, distribution and treatment of crime victims, this framework offers an alternative lens that focuses on victim agency, identity and transformation. Building on the emancipatory project of feminist victimology, narrative and cultural criminology and an emerging narrative victimology the framework aims to provide a new conceptual reference point for victimological research. The article’s objectives are to demonstrate that this framework delivers a theoretically, empirically and ethically robust approach for exploring the mechanisms by which victims become resilient, and can even flourish, in the aftermath of criminal harm.

Cultural criminology and narrative criminology’s shared interests

Cultural criminology and narrative criminology’s shared interests

Immunity to Environmental Crime, Harm and Violence: An Ongoing Pandemic and a Possible Narrative Vaccine.

As of June 2020, there have been at least 2,540 mass shootings since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, CT, on December 14, 2012. Some have suggested that the repeated trauma of these massacres has created a collective "emotional numbness," lessening our empathy. This article asks whether a similar phenomenon is occurring with respect to environmental crime and harm. It considers whether we have developed "compassion fatigue" regarding environmental violence and contemplates a "workout regimen" for empathy for Gaia's suffering. In so doing, it seeks to engage with emerging work in the penumbra of narrative criminology and green cultural criminology.