Visual Criminology

From its earliest days, criminology has been a visual discipline, and the processes of the visual remain significant in the production and configuration of harm, crime, and justice. Reflecting the foundational power of the image, contemporary criminological and social theory are increasingly engaging with the processes and products of the visual from fine art to popular digital cultures. Following a longstanding and critical theoretical interest in the politics of meaning and the ways that our understandings of the phenomena of crime and justice shape (and are shaped-by) their cultural meaning and significance, visual criminology has begun to address the ways that contemporary social conditions, crime, justice, politics, and history configure the production and meaning of the visual (and vice versa). Detailing and employing the most prominent methodological and theoretical approaches at work in visual criminology, with a focus on the ways in which visually-attentive theory can enrich and enliven critical understandings of social relations, this book traces the development of the visual as a field and object of inquiry in criminology and social science at large. It describes the key methodological tendencies of the field, and theoretically explains and explores the visual perspective in relation to material ecology and environmental harm, drugs and drug culture, prison and punishment, and police and police power. This book broadens the horizons of criminological engagement and reveals how visual criminology—as one dimension of a broader sensory agenda—can offer new and critical ways to understand and theorize crime and harm

2021