Cultural Criminology Research Articles

Performative Criminology and the “State of Play” for Theatre with Criminalized Women

This article applies feminist theory with cultural criminology to explore the role of theatre in the lives of criminalized women. Theatre initiatives for criminalized populations are growing worldwide, and so we are seeking to better understand how these two realms intersect. This article is based on a case study which was conducted at the Clean Break Theatre Company in London, England in the summer of 2013. We explore some of the emerging themes, which took shape from a thematic analysis. First we describe how theatre can be used as a lens into the experiences of criminalized women, and then as a tool for growth in their lives. The role of environment at Clean Break, and the role of voice from practicing theatre in a women-only environment are then discussed. Lastly, the roles of transformation and growth overall for the participants are explored in relation to their experiences with theatre practices. This article works to understand how theatre practices can elevate and adapt cultural criminology into a new form of imaginative criminology, and questions how we can embrace this form of engagement between theatre and criminology within a Canadian context.

Book review: Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl, Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Comic Book Crime examines crime, justice and law and order as depicted in American comic books, while simultaneously examining the manner in which complex criminological perspectives often manifest themselves as retributive or incapacitation narratives in popular fiction and media discourse. While comics scholarship is a relatively under-developed area of criminological enquiry, This article examines Phillips and Strobl's book which effectively straddles the divide between cultural criminology and the ‘law and literature’ movement. The book tells the story of an industry that has grown from its pulp fiction beginnings to become a primary source of material for mass market crime narratives, especially Hollywood cinema, while remaining true to its crime story origins.

CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY

This article discusses aspects of cultural criminology that are a continuation of the critical tradition on one hand and aspects that constitute qualitatively new insights on the other. Cultural criminology emerged in the 1990s as a branch of criminology building on the heritage of critical criminology and adapting it to changing social and political conditions. In attempting to respond to the analytical and ideological crisis in critical criminology, cultural criminologists have adapted new concepts (such as transgression and edgework), found new methods for researching liquid and complex phenomena, and engaged in activism to counter processes of othering in the public sphere. Cultural criminology focuses on several major problems: the tensions of late modernity in interactions between individuals and groups negotiating norms by and in upholding or breaking them; the presentation and reification of crime in the media; the spatial analysis of power relations. The article argues that the main focus of the field is understanding (Verstehen), based on the principle of sensitive criminological understanding, and enabling a discussion of multiple normativity and a praxis–oriented application of knowledge.

Urban Policy, City Control and Social Catharsis: The Attack on Social Frailty as Therapy: Fig. 1

Urban policies have increasingly been ‘criminalised’ as regeneration, public housing management and homelessness programmes have been aligned with the aims of criminal justice and anti-social behaviour measures. In this article, policies that tackle problem places, people and behaviours are interpreted as expressions of social anger and fear that are made tangible via periodic attacks on social marginality. Case examples are offered in which urban policies appear as a kind of social catharsis or exorcizing of fear/anxiety. Such urban policies appear to construct social vulnerability as a threat that thereby helps to trigger interventions that might help realize goals of urban renewal and release from worries about criminality and urban social decline. This model of control and policymaking is developed by drawing on the emotional energies at the heart of cultural criminology and critical perspectives taken from contemporary urban studies.

Green cultural criminology: constructions of environmental harm, consumerism, and resistance to ecocide

1. Introduction: greening criminology and connecting to the cultural 2. Overview of cultural criminology 3. A green field for cultural criminology 4. Constructions of Environmental Harm 5. Consumption, environment, health and happiness 6. Marketing and consuming nature and the natural: water, quarantine and infantilisation 7. Resistance to Environmental Harm 8. Conclusion and Future Directions.

Never boring: Jock Young as cultural criminologist

Jock Young (1942–2013) was one of the world’s foremost criminologists. This paper traces his academic career in sociology and criminology and its culmination in the theoretical, methodological, and interventionist approach known as cultural criminology. Drawing on a 2008 interview with Professor Young and the authors’ longstanding relationship with him, this paper in addition explores the convergence of Young’s intellectual trajectory with the emerging contours of cultural criminology.

Cultural realism?

Cultural criminology has provided a much needed energy and diversity within academic criminology. However, it has been criticised for its notion of ‘culture’, its tendency to romanticise deviance and for its lack of engagement with policy development. Realist criminology, on the other hand, has expressed a commitment to taking crime and victimisation seriously and to being policy relevant. The question that this paper addresses is whether these two strands of criminology can be combined to produce an approach that is both critical and useful. This was a question that Jock Young raised in his later writings.

From Silence to Propagation: Understanding the Relationship between “Stop Snitchin” and “YOLO”

Beginning in the early twenty-first century, “Stop Snitchin”—a technique of not speaking to police—was at the forefront of urban hip-hop culture. With the exponential growth of social media, however, the idiom switched to “YOLO”—You Only Live Once. This phrase has glamorized American values of individualism and exceptionalism, thus contradicting “Stop Snitchin,” as people use social media as a platform to display their exploits and apply “YOLO” to dismiss criminal and deviant behavior. This article examines the intersections of social media, crime, and deviance as well as the influence of the prison industrial complex on social promotion of crime and deviant behavior. Using cultural criminology, this article seeks to identify how power is achieved through different forms of impression management, moving from silence to broadcasting in three ways: (1) chance, (2) announced, and (3) rehearsed performances.

The firm: towards a study of 400 football gangs

The essay looks at how to conduct better contemporary research into football hooligan gangs in the light of flawed media reporting of the phenomenon and a general move away from the rich tradition of ethnography in sociology, physical cultural studies and criminology in recent years. The essay explores some theoretical and methodological issues arising from conducting a research project into football hooligan writings. It looks at the project's utility for longer term ethnographic and historical research into the many hundreds of football hooligan gangs that can be identified in a longitudinal cultural mapping of the field. The essay presents material from a sustained archival research project where one copy of each item of a genre known as football hooligan memoirs was archived, and authors and publishers were interviewed. The essay is an audit for a contemporary and possible future study of football hooligan gangs.

Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination. By Alison Young (Routledge, 2014, 177pp. £75.00 hb, £24.99 pb)

This is a book about illegal art on the street. It covers a wide range of artistic practice from graffiti through to guerrilla knitting, but with the main focus on ‘street art’. Alison Young offers an intelligent and engaging account of her experiences as ‘a spectator to and researcher of street art’ (p. 9) drawing on ‘two decades looking at art on city walls’ (p. 9). Her research involved what she calls an ‘ethnography of the cityscape’ (p. 91) including interviews with 64 street artists from several cities conducted over a number of years. The book is structured around six substantive chapters interspersed by five vignettes of encounters with street art. Whilst Young has a romanticized view of street art and states, ‘It would be easy to mistake the book’s approach as stemming from an uncritical affection … to assume it is a ‘fanboy’ account’ (p. 33), space is also given to more critical perspectives. The aim is to examine street art through ‘the ways in which affect intersects with notions of property, entitlement, ownership and propriety in urban space’. (p. 33) It is clearly of interest to urban scholars and cultural geographers. It is also of interest to urban and cultural criminologists—as well as wider criminology, especially concerning issues of criminalisation.

Toward a Green-Cultural Criminology of “the Rural”

There are many connections between the various strands of critical criminology. Previously, we highlighted common issues between green and cultural criminology, while also noting some of the ways that each perspective could potentially benefit from cross-fertilization (Brisman and South in Crime Media Cult 9(2):115–135, 2013, Green cultural criminology: constructions of environmental harm, consumerism and resistance to ecocide. Routledge, Oxford, 2014; McClanahan in Crit Criminol. doi: 10.1007/s10612-014-9241-8 , 2014). In this article, we extend our analysis to consider green, cultural and rural criminologies through the exposition of several key issues, including “the rural” as local context in which exploitative global forces may exercise power; agribusiness and the food/profit chain; farming and the pollution of land, water and air; and finally, cultural/media images and narratives of rural life. We focus more specifically on this final intersectionality through an analysis of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), analyzing his depictions of rural people, environmental activists, and the rural environment through the issue of mountaintop removal. We conclude our article by identifying several examples of key directions in which the intersectionality of green, cultural and rural criminologies might proceed, including trafficking and abuse of farmworkers, harms associated with the cultivation of quinoa, and a critical interpretation of media and popular narrative depictions of environmental issues within rural contexts.

Hunting Worlds Turned Upside Down

When asked by one of the editors of this special issue to consider submitting an essay on the significance to cultural criminology of a certain seventeenth-century Dutch painting that we had pointedly brought to his attention, one of us happily replied that we would attempt it. As likely authors, however, we soon began to mutter to ourselves that for our purposes, we were unable to distinguish with much satisfaction between cultural criminology, green criminology1 and visual criminology.2 We remain unable to do so. This seems not least because on numer‐ ous points and issues – power, inequality, spectacle, exclusion and suffering, for example – the chosen concepts and concerns of each of these evolving perspec‐ tives intersect with and blend into those of the other two. To the emerging perspective of what its exponents have recently dubbed a ‘greencultural criminology’ (Brisman & South, 2013), this essay seeks to add an explora‐ tory historical case study of ‘the visual’: Life of a Hunter (c. 1647-1650) by the Dutch painter Paulus Potter. In keeping with the spirit of Brisman and South’s consideration of ‘the cultural significance of the environment’ (2013: 130 [empha‐ sis in original]), our aim here is to examine how, on occasion, the production and consumption of a certain image simultaneously manages to reflect the prevailing cultural standards of an era and to show the way to their erosion and possible transcendence. In approaching our task, we are also motivated by a shared inter‐ est in the current movement towards a nonspeciesist criminology.3 (By ‘nonspe‐ ciesism’ we refer to and embrace what is surely one of the most daunting tasks facing criminology, namely, disengagement from the historical dominance of human interests over those of animals in discourses of abuse, cruelty and harm.)

Cultural criminology and its practices: a dialog between the theorist and the street researcher

This paper sets out to explain to a sociological/criminological audience the theory and practice of what has become known as cultural criminology. The authors have approached this task as a dialog, a conversation, that brings together the critiques and abstractions of the theorist (Jock Young), with his 30-year involvement in the deviance field and the empirical data and experiences of the urban street researcher (David Brotherton) who has spent much of the last 12 years studying and working with gang members. Our aim is to show how this approach to the study of deviance is more appropriate in this period of late modernity than that which currently dominates the field, a positivistic fundamentalism bent on rendering human action into the predictable, the quantifiable, and the mundane.

Green and Grey: Water Justice, Criminalization, and Resistance

Since its initial proposal in the 1990s, ‘green criminology’ has focused on environmental crimes and harms affecting non-human and human life, ecosystems, and the planet as a whole. Describing global trends toward privatization of water supply systems and the criminalization of several water conservation activities and tactics, this paper employs theoretical perspectives offered by green, cultural, and critical criminologies, focusing on overt resistance to water privatization and oppressive regulations governing rainwater storage and residential water recycling. Taking a critical theoretical perspective, this paper examines water access and autonomy, individuals and groups openly resisting the criminalization of household water reuse and storage, and the cultural significance of water. This paper concludes with an exploration of the potential benefits of a green cultural criminology.

Book review: Keith Hayward and Mike Presdee (eds), Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image

Book review: Keith Hayward and Mike Presdee (eds), Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image

Commodifying compliance? UK urban music and the new mediascape

Subcultural theory and cultural criminology have traditionally viewed ‘underground’ youth movements as providing images of deviance/resistance which the cultural industries harvest to turn a profit. The logic follows that street and sub cultures imbue products with a ‘transgressive edge’ that increases their appeal within youth markets. This paper uses the example of UK ‘grime’ music to demonstrate how this dynamic cannot be viewed as applying universally in contemporary times. Where their street orientated content is censured, many grime artistes express a desire for commercial success which would ultimately emerge through muting their rhetorical links to crime and violence and explicitly championing ‘mainstream’ values. This case is used as an empirical cue to explore the use and critique of the concept of ‘resistance’ within cultural criminology and subcultural theory. The paper problematizes commodification of resistance discourses as they apply to the rugged culture of the streets and indeed its supposed ‘oppositional’ character where disadvantaged urban youth clearly embody and practice the logic of neoliberalism. It furthermore suggests that certain critiques of cultural criminology go too far in denying any meaning to criminality and subcultural practice beyond consumer desire. Ultimately, the concept of ‘defiance’ is suggested as a useful tool to understand the norms of and behaviours of the excluded.

To resist = to create? Some thoughts on the concept of resistance in cultural criminology

Today, we are told, the practice of resistance – especially political resistance in the form of protest and activism – is making a comeback. ‘The world is facing a wave of uprisings, protests and revolutions’, according to the back cover of Paul Mason’s influential recent book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere (2012), an engrossing text that has become something of a handbook for all sorts of activ‐ ists, from hard-core cyber-protestors to would-be revolutionaries. But while resistance is once again highly fashionable, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is also characterized by a palpable lack of definitional consensus, with the term being employed in a haphazard fashion to describe everything from fullblown revolutionary protest (Adib-Moghaddam, 2013; McDermott & Stibbe, 2006) to women who watch television soap operas (Brown, 1994). This broad application of the label ‘resistance’ to a very diverse and often contradictory set of practices also extends to a growing number of activities and pursuits that occur within the discipline of criminology. It is essential therefore that criminologists interested in studying the subject do so with some measure of conceptual clarity. This article aims to provide a more analytical understanding of the label ‘resist‐ ance’ – especially as it is deployed and appropriated in Western liberal democra‐ cies. It sets out from the premise that the notion of resistance, although it has been current in criminology for some time, is still vaguely defined. In order to provide more analytical precision, we will first review how notions of resistance and rebellion are currently employed within criminology generally and cultural criminology specifically. In the second part, we explore the implications for how we might conceive of a conception of resistance as a positive or ‘creative force’, rather than simply a negative counter-reaction against cultural, social or econom‐ ical power relations that exist at a particular moment in a society. The third part is devoted to four events that radically transform a certain situation in the fields of politics, art, love and science. In the fourth part we investigate the limitations of resistance by reference to the counterculture of the Sixties. In the fifth and final part, we put forward the case for thinking about resistance as a three-stage process.

“Delinquent Boys”: Toward a New Understanding of “Deviant” and Transgressive Behavior in Gay Men

Cultural criminology suggests that crime, deviance, and transgression are often subcultural in nature. For this reason, cultural criminologists often focus on the simultaneous forces of cultural inclusion and social exclusion when explaining criminal, deviant, or transgressive behaviors. This is a particularly useful bricolage for examining contemporary gay deviance and transgression—behaviors that are perhaps closely linked to (if not directly caused by) the past isolation, marginalization and/or oppression of homosexuals by Western heteronormative societies. It is also useful for understanding behaviors that are the result of marginalization and oppression from other sources, namely, the gay community itself. Using subcultural theories of deviance—such as those favored by cultural criminologists—this article explores a perspective that can be used for exploring certain forms of gay deviance and transgression. First, some of the more ostensible criminological theories that satisfy a prima facie criminological inquiry will be presented and critiqued: labeling and stigma, and resistance to heteronormativity. To these will be added a new and potentially productive way of thinking that takes into consideration rule-breaking as a form of resistance to homonormative norms, values and rules.

„Jak ghetto – ty ublížíš mně, já ublížím tobě.“

This paper empirically examines the meaning of security within a socially excluded locality. Drawing on critical security studies and cultural criminology, ethnographic research was conducted to make sense of security from the perspective of the excluded. We provide an account of the dominant security narrative identified in the investigated discourse, where street violence is recognized as the most serious threat to the well-being of a local population. Violence is understood both as a means of satisfying drug addiction and as a mechanism of creating ’respect’. The interpretation is further analyzed through a framework inspired by the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, utilizing the concepts of street culture field, street capital, and street habitus. In the conclusion of the article, we claim that street violence is not the manifestation of the Roma ethnicity, as some put it, but that it should be approached as a symptom of social marginalization instead.

‘Cultural Criminology, Governmentality and the Liquidity of the Failing State: The View from Ireland’ for Critical Criminology

A number of incidents and community movements in the post-economic growth era have come to shape understandings of the Republic of Ireland’s marginalised groupings. These groups exist in both urban streetscapes and rural communities; all have come to represent a new culture of transgressive resistance in a state that has never completely dealt with issues of political legitimacy or extensive poverty, creating a deviant form of ‘liquid modernity’ which provides the space for such groupings to exist. The article demonstrates that the prevailing ideology in contemporary, post-downturn Ireland have created the conditions for incidents of ‘cultural criminology’ that at times erupt into episodes of counter hegemonic governmentality. The article further argues that these groups which have emerged may represent the type of transgressive Foucaultian governmentality envisaged by Kevin Stenson, while they are indicative of subcultures of discontent and nascent racism which belie the contented findings of various affluence and contentment surveys conducted during the years of rapid growth. The paper develops this theme of counter-hegemonic ‘governmentality’, or the regional attempts to challenge authorities by local groups of transgressors. The paper finally argues that, in many ways, the emergence of a culture of criminality in the Irish case, and media depictions of the same, can be said to stem from the corruption of that country’s elites as much as from any agenda for resistance from its beleaguered subcultures.