ABSTRACT

Emerging in the mid-1990s and accelerating rapidly during the first decade of the twentyfirst century, cultural criminology explores the complex interplay of crime, transgression and control under late modernity. It pays careful attention to crime’s omnipresent lifeworlds and mediascapes by critically interrogating the multilayered carceral contexts of advanced capitalism on individual, social and institutional consciousnesses and practices. It is a distinct theoretical and methodological approach that situates crime, transgression and control within the context of cultural dynamics (Hayward & Presdee, 2010). Perhaps more than any other of the critical orientations, cultural criminology recognizes the intersections of cultural and criminal processes under late modernity and the ways in which they interweave along a multiplicity of intersecting axis: pain and pleasure, production and consumption, accommodation and resistance, privacy and public display, messages and audiences, approved and fugitive meanings, intertextuality and reification. According to Hayward and Young (2010):

If traditional criminology mistakes textual dullness and robot like social actors for objectivity, cultural criminology zooms in on the phenomenal experience of crime, victimization and punishment, stressing anger, humiliation, exuberance, excitement and fear. It reveals the energy of everyday life whether in the transgressive breaking of rules or in repressive nature of conformity and boredom. (p. 108)

Given this, cultural criminology exists not in strict dialogic opposition to administrative or traditional criminological approaches, but instead rather as an anarchic de-shackling of criminological consciousness.