Search results

This chapter explores the intersections between narrative criminology and material culture studies using a single object – my wife's old Nazi rifle – as an example. It describes the various connections between the stories we tell and the things that surround us, including the stories objects represent, the stories they may prompt us to tell, the stories we tell using objects as props and the stories our material objects tell us about their owners or users. An object will always tell stories about past, present and future use. This is true of all objects, not just old Nazi rifles, but some things will carry more narrative potential than others. Finally, I ask whether some narratively loaded objects may anticipate or perhaps even precipitate certain actions. Is it true that some objects sometimes ask us to put them to use?

Cultural criminologists have long been interested in the politics of crime and deviance, whether that be in relation to youth subculture resistance or the social reaction to transgression evident in the media construction of folk devils and moral panics. While contemporary ‘new’ cultural criminology continues to be focused on the situated experience of deviant ‘edgeworkers’, this chapter argues cultural criminology’s concern with the crime-media nexus provides particularly fertile ground for exploring insights provided by activists, academics, professional journalists and citizen journalists around informal interventions on formal criminal justice processes using social media and digital technologies. Drawing on examples from a burgeoning body of crime-media research, the chapter makes a case for ‘cultural criminology activism’, which, like activist criminology, is consciously disengaged from mainstream criminology’s alignment with the neoliberal-carceral state and its reformist agenda.

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).

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young adults in the UK. We apply Matza ideas of the “techniques of neutralization,” “subterranean values,” and “drift” within an ethnographic study on alcohol to suggest that young people's “calculated hedonism” can be understood as a strategy of agency in the context of a subcultural setting. This article adds to the literature of symbolic interaction, subculture and the discipline of sociology by critically focusing on the work of David Matza from its reception in the 1960s to today as a central element of the new paradigm of cultural criminology. For us the sociological imagination is “alive and well” through Matza's advocacy of naturalism whereby he sought to integrate the work Chicago School under Park and Burgess with his assessment of the so-called Neo-Chicago School. In the literature Matza's work is often defined as symbolic interactionist we see his ambition in a wider sense of wanting sociology to recover human struggle and the active creation of meaning. Our approach is to understand the calculated hedonism of young adult use of alcohol through their humanity.

This chapter makes a case for a decolonial, intersectional approach to narrative criminology. It argues that in growing contexts of deepening inequalities, research approaches that humanise people on the margins and that explicitly centre questions of social justice are ever more urgent. This chapter explicates a decolonial, intersectional narrative analysis, working with the data generated in interviews with women sex workers on their experiences of violence outlining how a decolonial, intersectional, narrative analysis may be accomplished to analyse the intersections of power at material, representational and structural levels. The chapter illustrates the importance of an intersectional feminist lens for amplifying the complexity of women sex workers' experiences of gendered violence and for understanding the multiple forms of material, symbolic and institutionalised subordination they experience in increasingly unequal and oppressive contexts. It ends by considering the contributions decolonial, intersectional feminist work can offer narrative criminology, especially the emerging field of narrative victimology.

This chapter examines the potential of ‘Artivism’ for activist criminology. Drawing on a body of work developed since 2016, this chapter explores a series of projects that have examined how an approach to research that harnesses the activist qualities of art could be used to inform transformative criminological research. Artivism is an approach that involves merging ‘the boundless imagination of art and the radical engagement of politics’ (Jordan, 2020, p. 60), and by amplifying marginalised voices, the overarching aim is to effect social and political change. This type of activist art is not reducible to the production of political art – art about an issue – but instead seeks to change the way that we think, speak, and act. In this sense, this approach accords with the principles of critical social research in ensuring that ‘the voices and experiences of those marginalised by institutionalised state practices are heard and represented’ (Scraton, 2007, p. 10). Examining pilot projects developed with artists and producers based in Liverpool, England, and focussed on experiences of prison and probation, the authors examine the potential that this approach has to change both the way they work as critical criminologists and the objects of this study. With reference to the question of a method for activist criminology, the chapter suggests that critical criminological work can be informed and enhanced by collaboration with socially engaged art – a form of artistic practice that seeks to address social and political issues and is often associated with activist strategies. This chapter, therefore, aims to contribute to debates about how activist criminologies may be done and offers suggestions for new directions in this work underpinned by interdisciplinary collaborations and the coproduction of research with those similarly committed to a transformative project.