Crime, Media and Cinema

Course goals

After this course:

• Students have developed the skills needed to produce thorough visual content analysis and is equipped to conduct rigorous analysis of cinema.

• Students can conceptualise cinema within criminology and has an understanding of how films, series, documentaries, and related media shape cultural meanings of crime, harm, and control through the employment of key concepts from criminology, media, and cultural studies (e.g., male gaze, cultural violence, cultural hegemony, ways of seeing).

• Students can identify relations of power and inequality in various forms of representation. In other words, students are able to critically assess how unequal economies of visibility shape depictions of class, race, gender, and queerness, including the normalisation of symbolic and structural violence.

• Students are able to apply semiotic and visual-analysis tools developed in the course to other screen media (e.g., social platforms, music videos, advertising, political communication). Thus, students can transfer visual literacy beyond cinema.

Content

In contemporary societies saturated by screens, where cinematic consumption has become a routine practice for millions, these representations circulate far beyond the screen itself, shaping our imagination and feeding into other media forms, from social platforms and advertising to political discourse. Across the course, students will develop a criminological gaze on cinema: a systematic way of analysing cinema from a criminological perspective, with particular attention to how it constructs meaning about crime, harm and control through narrative, image, sound, genre, performance, affect, and more. Apart from learning the basic skills to deeply analyze cinema, students will learn to move beyond plot summary and explicit messages, attending instead to the implicit “working logics” through which cinema makes certain interpretations feel natural, and others implausible.

The course situates cinematic analysis within foundational frameworks in criminology, media, and cultural studies. Students will engage with theories of representation, violence, hegemony, and visuality, alongside critical perspectives on class, race, gender, and queerness. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between cinema and power: how unequal economies of visibility shape which stories dominate, which bodies become readable as threatening or deserving, and how symbolic and structural violence can be normalised through repetition and aesthetic pleasure. While acknowledging that audiences are not passive, and that films can generate oppositional readings and counter-narratives, the course explores how the scale of cinematic circulation makes cinema a key site where social meanings are rehearsed and sedimented.

Teaching combines lectures with seminar discussion, close scene analysis and guided methodological workshops (including a film festival). Students will build practical skills in visual and narrative analysis – shot composition, framing, editing, sound, performance, genre, and more – learning to connect formal choices to cultural and criminological questions and to produce rigorous, evidence-based interpretations. They will learn the basics of semiotics and how to read images and scenes, equipping them to conduct visual content analysis that can be applied beyond cinema, from music videos to Instagram reels and advertising.


 
Place of the course within the curriculum:
Optional course in the minor Criminology
Optional non-legal course