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Arthur W. Frank's dialogical narrative analysis (DNA) has been a recent addition to the plethora of methods in analysing stories. What makes this method unique from the rest is its concern for both the story's content and its effects. Stories are seen as selection/evaluation systems that do things for and on people. This chapter aims to provide the reader a heuristic guide in conducting DNA and emphasises learning through exemplars as the way of learning DNA. It provides an outline of DNA and reviews how researchers have applied it in different disciplines. Then, DNA will be applied in in the current ‘war on drugs’ in the Philippines. The stories of the policy actors – for and against the drug war – will be analysed to explore how stories affect policy choices and actions, call actors to assume different identities, associate/dissociate these actors and show how they hold their own in telling their stories. Finally, the potential of using DNA in criminology and criminal justice will be discussed.

With the objective of encouraging the use of standard processes for exploring offenders' narratives two complementary procedures are discussed. One is a development of McAdams explorations with highly effective individuals, describing their life as if it were a book. This is a structured interview protocol that has been specifically produced for use with offenders, in which they describe their life as a film (LAAF). A number of studies with male and female incarcerated individuals as well as those without convictions have revealed important differences between people in how they give a free account of their past and future lives. This allows the differentiation of LAAF narratives and reveals the existence of dominant narrative forms in offenders' responses. These relate to those initially elaborated by Frye (1957) for fiction, namely tragedy, comedy, adventure and romance. The second method is the Narrative Role Questionnaire (NRQ) which elicits the inherent role that offenders saw themselves as playing during specific crimes. Completion of the NRQ by various samples reveals important differences between offences in the narratives that provide the agency for their criminal actions. The roles central to these narratives have also been found to embody distinct emotional components that maintain offending. Taken together the NRQ and the LAAF provide a framework for examining offence narratives which enables the main narratives of relevance to criminality to be identified and their implications for theory and practice to be elaborated.

In their daily practice, criminal justice professionals tell stories about their ‘clientele’ and these narratives legitimise their roles and decision-making. My research underscores how narratives of crime inform the practice of youth justice. The research presented in this chapter is based on court case file analysis and interviews with youth justice practitioners, concentrating on how they ‘theorise’ the causes of crime of migrant youth and which interventions they deem appropriate.

The chapter raises a methodological discussion on whether narrative researchers can and should attempt to actively question research participants' accounts, which constitute (penal) harm, introducing an interviewing model that I call ‘light’ Socratic dialogues. The aim of this interviewing style is to gradually move the narrator from doxa (‘common’ knowledge and practice) to episteme and to actively question research participants' accounts. ‘Socrates light’ that I propose in this chapter draws on two bodies of methodological literature. On the one hand, I integrate some principles from ‘active’ interviewing styles, often used in ‘researching up’. On the other hand, I draw on feminist methodology, which offers important insights on how to counterbalance the confronting aspects of ‘active’ interviewing.

The chapter reflects on some of my research interactions and discusses the rationale and the implications of the proposed mode of interviewing. I make three points: first, extensively documenting the interview context and interactions helps us to reflect on the (shifting) narrative performance of those involved in research. Second, becoming ‘active’ as researchers during the interview can enhance the analysis. Third, narrative studies can potentially be transformative if we question the narratives.

This chapter draws on previous work calling for a narrative criminology sensitive to fictional stories about how we have instigated or sustained harmful action with respect to the environment. It begins by offering some defining features of narrative criminology, before turning to two examples of narrative criminological work focused on environmental crime and/or harm. One analyzes a corporate (offender's) website; the other examines attorneys' stories of environmental wrongdoing. Together, they depict a cultural narrative in the US of the causes, consequences, punishments (or lack thereof) and corporate representations of environmental harm. Next, this chapter turns to a discussion of examples of depictions or representations of environmental harm and protection in the literature. Here, the focus is on fictional works that are explicitly environmental – where the subject, plot and message centre on one or more environmental issues, such as a particular harm, its cause or causes and possible responses thereto. Finally, this chapter considers ‘allegories of environmental harm,’ examining literature that is less overtly environmental. As an illustration, it suggests an interpretation of the American children's story, Muncus Agruncus: A Bad Little Mouse (Watson, 1976), as a cautionary tale of Western hubris in the face of environmental catastrophe – with the goal of demonstrating how green criminologists have attempted to identify environmental lessons and messages in works with ostensibly other or broader messages. Overall, the intent is to acknowledge both that cultural narratives (and our interpretation of them) change and to demonstrate (the importance of) human agency to transform those narratives (and our interpretation thereof).

By considering the stories of crime victims, this chapter demonstrates the fluid and contextual nature of narrative. It draws upon research that investigates narratives of individuals who have lost loved ones to homicide (co-victims) by pairing intensive interviews with concurrent participant observation in a wide array of settings in which co-victims share their stories, such as fundraisers, memorials, self-help group meetings, advocacy events and celebratory gatherings. It highlights the benefit of two related methodological strategies for a narrative approach to victimology specifically and narrative criminology more generally: persistent observation of stories and prolonged engagement with storytellers. In doing so, it emphasises three key features of narrative that are especially useful in uncovering the nature, power and potential of crime victims' stories: speaker, audience and timing.

This paper seeks to analyse the content and implications of resolution 52/1 of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations (UN) titled “Promoting international cooperation in addressing the involvement of women and girls in drug trafficking, especially as couriers”.

Drawing on socio‐legal analysis and an extensive search of UN databases, the resolution is contextualised and the findings of the resulting report which examines the scale of women's participation in the global drug trade is summarised.

The article demonstrates that the data produced are unreliable as a measure of women's participation in the international drug trade.

It is argued that this resolution is weakened by lack of clarity about how gender ought to be mainstreamed in global drug control.

As the first resolution on women and girls' participation in the international drug trade, Resolution 52/1 is a significant step towards raising awareness and systematically accounting for their participation.

This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of an English medium-security prison housing men convicted of sex offences. It argues that victims haunted (Gordon, 2008) both the prison and the narratives of the men it held: they were ever-present in discourse, but depersonalised and lacking in agency. How prisoners described their victims said a great deal about how they sought to portray themselves, and the chapter makes this point by outlining three basic ‘types’ of story. In the first, the prisoner knew the victim well and deliberately sought to remember their suffering; at the same time, they themselves hoped not to be defined by their status as an offender. In the second, the victim was largely missing from the narrative, either because the prisoners barely remembered them or because the prisoners did not really consider them to be a victim. In the third type of story, the prisoners considered themselves to be the real victim, and considered the official victim as well as the criminal justice system to be responsible for their suffering. The chapter concludes by arguing victims were ghosts because the prison only allowed them to appear in certain ways. It suggests that narrative criminologists consider the relationship between narratives and justice, and that one way of doing this is to think about what stories don't communicate as well as what they do.

Drawing inspiration from C Wright Mills exhortation to sociologists to locate themselves and their experiences in the ‘trends of their epoch’, I consider how first-hand experience of imprisonment can help criminology account for the growing trend towards the use of imprisonment in many Western democracies. Using interviews with a small group of British criminologists who have experience of imprisonment, I explore the connections between personal stories and collective narratives. Drawing reflexively from my own imprisonment, my subsequent professional trajectory and experiences of prison research, I consider the difficulties and potential of crafting a collective criminological project from disparate and profoundly personal experiences of imprisonment. The chapter combines methodological reflections on the use of autoethnography, autobiography and vignettes as a means to an end: establishing collective narratives from personal stories. I argue that the task of connecting these narratives to the ‘trends of the epoch’ that manifest in expanding prison populations is difficult but developing some momentum in convict criminology.

Our aim is to highlight the value in using photographs and visuals for narrative criminology. We do this by showing how people draw from and create visual symbols to communicate personal narratives and by showing how we as researchers can use these images in interviews to elicit richer responses. Specifically, we illustrate the value of images for narrative criminology by telling the story of Chico, a 50-year-old, Hispanic man who has used meth for nearly three decades. In response to his marginalisation, Chico presents himself in two primary ways: as a rebellious, antiauthority menace to outsiders and as a caring, generous friend to insiders. He displays these identities through visual symbols (on his home, property and body) and through his stories and actions. Additionally, we use photographs taken of him and his home during interviews to elicit his personal narratives (i.e. photo-elicitation interviews). We argue that scholars have much to gain by examining the use of images to stimulate interviews and open necessary interdiscursivity of qualitative criminology.

Giambattista Piranesi's disturbing images of fantasy prisons set out in his Carceri d'Invenzione have had a profound impact on cultural sensibilities. The chapter explores Piranesi's distinctive visual language and situates it in an eighteenth-century penchant for ruins and what they might signify. The macabre fantasy structures bear little relation to actually existing prison buildings, but they do herald a new aesthetic combining both terror and beauty to sublime effect. The chapter examines the relationships between narrative and visual methods by considering that scholarship in art history which has sought to address the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’.

Much of it belongs to what was once the ‘new art history’ in the 1970s, and which had become critical of how conventional approaches in the discipline had tended to see art as the visualisation of narrative. For example, Norman Bryson's (1981) study of French painting in the Ancien Régime explored the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’ by examining the kind of stories pictures tell, drawing a distinction between the ‘discursive’ aspects of an image (posing questions on visual art's language-like qualities and relationships to written text) and those ‘figural’ features that place the image as primarily a visual experience – it's ‘being-as-image’ – that is entirely independent of language.

The focus on language is symptomatic of the ‘linguistic turn’ that has had such a profound influence on intellectual thought since the 1960s, and this chapter will concentrate on one strand in it. In particular, it will introduce the approach Jacques Derrida developed and defined as ‘deconstruction’, which in some important respects revealed the limitations of language, and seeks to create the effects of ‘decentring’ by highlighting how signification is a complex, often duplicitous, process. The chapter then situates Piranesi's images in an account of landscape, not least since he was a leading exponent of the veduta (a faithful representation of an actual urban or rural view) that had achieved the status of a distinctive and popular genre by the eighteenth century.