Cultural Criminology

Cultural Criminology is a relatively young branch of criminology, focused on the question how people ‘make meaning’ through criminal and deviant behavior, and how societal reactions to crime and deviancy are embedded in culture. Whereas in mainstream criminology we currently witness an emphasis on quantitative research, focused on the scientific philosophical goal of erklären; policy-evaluating research and ‘what works-questions’, cultural criminology, on the other hand, focuses on criminological verstehen. It tries to give insight in what deviant and criminal behavior mean to people, what this behavior looks like, how it smells, sounds and feels. Cultural criminologists pay attention to emotions involved in crime, and look at the cultural context from which such emotions and deviant acts emanate. Moreover, they study how culture itself becomes subject to criminalization. This approach demands a qualitative research method and cultural criminologists extensively use ethnography as a research technique. Visual methods, however, are also used, and increasingly so.

Apart from understanding deviant behavior and crime from within, cultural criminology tries to understand societies’ reactions to it. It aims to do so in a culturally sensitive way. Current common criminology theory is predominantly Western and mainly USA-oriented; this presents a problem of ethnocentrism and academic imperialism. Cultural criminology aims at an embedded criminology by situating crime, deviant behavior and societal reactions within the (cultural) context in which they manifests themselves. This course, therefore, gives ample opportunity to go beyond Western crime preoccupations and includes many examples from non-Western contexts. Thereby, it pays critical attention to late-modern processes of consumerism, mobility, migration & social exclusion, securitization, risk society and the intense role of media. As concerns the latter, this course embarks on a thorough and intensive engagement with media productions relevant to the field of criminology. It introduces the ‘film forum’ as a way to study and discuss crime and reactions to crime in our late modern, mediatized reality.