Ghost Criminology

The haunting effects of crime, violence, and death in our history, memory, and media spaces From Abu Ghraib and Holocaust death camps to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and slave plantations, spaces where violent crimes have occurred can often become forever changed, or “haunted,” in the public imagination. In this volume, Michael Fiddler, Travis Linnemann, and Theo Kindynis bring together an interdisciplinary group of distinguished scholars to study this phenomenon, exploring the origins, theory, and methodology of ghost criminology. Featuring Jeff Ferrell, Michelle Brown, Eamon Carrabine, and other prominent scholars, Ghost Criminology takes us inside spaces where the worst crimes have imprinted themselves on our history, memory, and media spaces. Contributors explore a wide range of these hauntological topics from a criminological perspective, including the excavation of graffiti in the London underground, the phantom of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA, during the 2017 riots, and the ghostly evidentiary traces of crime in motel rooms. Ultimately, Fiddler, Kindynis, and Linnemann offer ghost criminology as another way of seeing, and better understanding, the lingering impact of violence, oppression, and history in today’s world. Ghost Criminology curates cutting-edge research to break exciting new terrain.

Bringing together a range of perspectives, this book establishes a criminology of the domestic, paying particular attention to emerging spatial and relational reconfigurations. We move beyond criminologies of public and urban domains to consider over-looked non-public locales, and crimes and harms that occur in the home and other private spaces. Developed in the context of the COVID-19 lockdowns, where distinctions between public and private became increasingly untenable, the book considers how the pandemic has accelerated new patterns of behaviour, enabled by technology and shifting social relations. Drawing on a range of criminological topics, including victimisation, offending, property and violent crime, consumption, deviance and leisure, and zemiology, the book argues that the domestic sphere, and its relation to the public realm, needs to be more carefully conceptualised if criminology is to respond to new spatial and relational dimensions of changing lifestyles. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, politics, geography, history, gender, surveillance and security, and all those interested in a criminology of the domestic sphere.

Through a study of ten commercially published prison autobiographies, Haunting Prison: Exploring the Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institution unveils how prison is narrativized and socially represented as an abject and uncanny institution, shedding new light on what prison is and does in Western carceral imaginations.

This book presents the work of a new generation of critical criminologists who explore the geographical, institutional, and political contexts of the discipline in Canada. Breaking away from mainstream criminology and law-and-order discourses, the authors offer a spectrum of theoretical approaches to criminal justice -- from governmentality to feminist criminology, from critical realism to anarchism � and they propose novel approaches to topics ranging from genocide to white-collar crime. By posing crucial questions and attempting to define what criminology should be, this book will shape debates about crime, policing, and punishment for years to come.

This distinctive and engaging book proposes an imaginative criminology, focusing on how spaces of transgression are lived, portrayed and imagined. These include spaces of control or confinement, including prison and borders, and spaces of resistance. Examples range from camps where asylum seekers and migrants are confined, to the exploration of deviant identities and the imagined spaces of surveillance and control in young adult fiction. Drawing on oral history, fictive portrayals, walking methodologies, and ethnographic and arts-based research, the book pays attention to issues of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, mobility and nationality as they intersect with lived and imagined space.

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.

Sensory Penalties aims to reinvigorate a conversation about the role of sensory experience in empirical investigation. It explores the visceral, personal reflections buried within forgotten criminological field notes, to ask what privileging these sensorial experiences does for how we understand and research spaces of punishment and social control.