Criminology Deviance And The Silver Screen

This text argues for the usefulness of fictional realities for criminological theorizing and analysis. It illustrates that a creative and critical social scientific practice requires craft norms rather than commercial norms that threaten to completely colonize higher education.

Celluloid Mischief examines the portrayal of wrongdoing and “deviant” behavior in film. The premise is that films are material products of both individual and collective imagination that reflect the values and norms of the society that produce them. On this basis, it is possible to perceive how society understands and classifies particular kinds of behavior and assigns or designates classes of people and actions as “good” or “bad.” So-called “wrongdoing” in movies, then, tells us about real-life norms, the violation of those norms, and the efforts to punish and control the perpetrators of those violators. Motion pictures embody information about the social world; they constitute a universe of raw particulars that await excavation and analysis. By applying the appropriate approach, what happens on the screen can guide us to an understanding of society and culture. Films are commercial products; the people who make them are members of a society, influenced by that society, who attempt to appeal to lots of other members of that society by producing something that they want to see. A society's films tell us a great deal about the taste and proclivities of the society that produce and consume them. Using postwar and contemporary Hollywood cinema as case studies, this book demonstrates the complex and evolving nature of modern America's social, economic, and political values.

Standing at the intersection of criminology and philosophy, this book demonstrates the ways in which mythic movies and television series can provide an understanding of actual crimes and social harms. Taking three social problems as its subjects – capitalist political economy, structural injustice, and racism – the book explores the ways in which David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019), and Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) offer solutions by reconceiving justice in terms of personal and collective transformation, utopian thinking, and the relationship between racism and elitism, respectively. In doing so, the authors set out a theory of understanding the world based on cinematic and televisual works of art and conclude with a template that establishes a methodology for future use. An Epistemology of Criminological Cinema is authoritative and accessible, ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, criminologists, philosophers, and film, television, and literary critics with an interest in social justice and social harm.

This book uses popular films to understand the convergence of crime control and the ideology of repression in contemporary capitalism. It focuses on the cinematic figure of the fallen guardian, a protagonist who, in the course of a narrative, falls from grace and becomes an enemy of the established social order. The fallen guardian is a figure that allows for the analysis of a particular crime control measure through the perspective of both an enforcer and a target. The very notion of ‘justice’ is challenged, and questions are posed in relation to the role that films assume in the reproduction of policing as it is. In doing so, the book combines a historical far-reaching perspective with popular culture analysis. At the core remains the value of the cinematic figure of the fallen guardian for contemporary understandings of urban space and urban crime control and how films are clear examples of the ways in which the ideology of repression is reproduced. This book questions the justifications that are often given for social control in cities and understands cinema as a medium for offering critique of such processes and justifications. Explored are the crime control measures of private policing in relation to RoboCop (1987), preventative policing and Minority Report (2002), mass incarceration in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and extra-judicial killing in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The book speaks to those interested in crime control in critical criminology, cultural criminology, urban studies, and beyond.

C. Wright Mills and the Criminological Imagination investigates the emergence and lineage of a criminological concept indebted to Mills’ thought, adapting and applying it to a specifically criminological context. With attention to theoretical concerns, as well as the application of the criminological imagination in concrete empirical research, this volume sheds new light on the methodological and analytical aspects of the criminological imagination as a multifaceted concept, exploring the possibilities that it offers for the emergence of an imaginative criminological practice.

Literary Theory and Criminology demonstrates the significance of contemporary literary theory to the discipline of criminology, particularly to those criminologists who are primarily concerned with questions of power, inequality, and harm. Drawing on innovations in philosophical, narrative, cultural, and pulp criminology, it sets out a deconstructive framework as part of a critical criminological critique-praxis. This book comprises eight essays – on globalisation, criminological fiction, poststructuralism, patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, anthropocidal ecocide, critical theory, and critical praxis – that argue for the value of contemporary literary theory to a critical criminology concerned with the construction of a just and sustainable reality in the face of climate change and other mass harms. This is the first criminology book to engage with literary theory from the perspective of criminology and provides a guide for criminologists who want to deploy literary theory as part of their research programmes. It supersedes existing engagements with poststructuralism in the philosophical criminological tradition because it entails neither a constructionist ontology nor a relativist epistemology. It shows criminologists how literary theory offers the tools to first deconstruct and then reconstruct meaning and value. Literary Theory and Criminology is essential reading for all critical criminological theorists.

Drawing on complex narratives across film, TV, novels and graphic novels, this authoritative critical analysis demonstrates the value of fictional narratives as a tool for understanding, explaining and reducing crime and social harm. McGregor establishes an original theory of the criminological value of fiction.