Journal Description
Crime, Media, Culture is a fully peer reviewed, international journal providing the primary vehicle for exchange between scholars who are working at the intersections of criminological and cultural inquiry. It promotes a broad cross-disciplinary understanding of the relationship between crime, criminal justice, media and culture.
The crime/media/culture nexus speaks to many whose work is embedded in theories of social relations and social change, and therefore maintains high relevance across the full spectrum of social sciences and humanities. Crime, Media, Culture provides a unique and much needed forum for serious debate underpinned by empirically novel and/or theoretically rigorous research.
“Somewhere between criminology and cultural studies in an area of excitement. It is here where the cultural shift is most evident and where a journal like Crime, Media, Culture can provide just the right lens at the right time” Jock Young, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, USA and University of Canterbury, UK
“Crime, Media, Culture acknowledges what so many scholars have long recognized, namely the critical importance of media and cultural representations in shaping popular stereotypes of crime and justice, and thus of official policies. All the better the journal’s international nature promises a long overdue integration of existing scholarship in North America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. I am delighted to be associated with this project” Philip Jenkins, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Access all issues of Crime, Media, Culture on SAGE Journals Online.
This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Journal Feed
- by Sarah N SnyderCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. The debate over whether or not to have police officers carry naloxone was waged long enough in Windsor, Ontario that it became referred to in the local media as “the naloxone issue.” Compared to other cities and towns in the Canadian province, Windsor was slow to equip police officers with the life-saving drug that reverses the effects of opioid overdose. In this paper, we document the unhurried development of this particular harm reduction measure as it unfolded over the course of several years. We draw on theories of human disposability in our analysis of […]
- by Václav WalachCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This study seeks to expand the criminological interest in narrative fiction by examining the functions that complex fictional stories on crime control can perform. As a case study, the article takes the Czech Television series The Nineties, which tells the story of a police investigation into murders linked to the rise of organised crime in 1990s Czechia. Broadcast in early 2022, the show became widely popular, as it was seen as not only covering real-world events but also providing an interpretation of the complicated period of postsocialism. Inspired mainly by narrative criminology and Rafe […]
- by Janani UmamaheswarCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Researchers have examined how perpetrators of harm—and those close to them—grapple with moral questions related to culpability and victimhood, often by developing excuses and justifications that “neutralize” the damage inflicted. Building on this research, I use 18 in-depth interviews with family members of men incarcerated for a violent offense to explore the “fictionalizing tendencies” in their accounts of their loved ones’ harm. Drawing on scholarship in philosophy and literary theory, I illuminate how the imposition of a narrative structure commonly found in fiction facilitated family members’ sense-making processes as they confronted their loved ones’ […]
- by Nickie D PhillipsCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. In this paper, we examine the role played by popular media in propagating myths around policing and buttressing the prison-industrial complex (PIC). We provide a conceptual framework for understanding how policing logics are amplified, contested, and resonate through popular media as part of a hegemonic process to sustain the PIC. We suggest that the scaffolding for these logics is built through rhetoric that normalizes the routine violence of policing (copspeak), the ways in which police create and control their own image (image work), and the widespread tendency of popular media to portray policing in […]
- by Miltonette Olivia CraigCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Research and policy continue to focus on the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) in the U.S., with estimates indicating that 81 million people have been victimized by a partner in their lifetime. IPV disproportionately impacts women, and Black women in particular face victimization at a much higher rate when compared to other groups. Considering their overrepresentation, advocates have called for increased attention to IPV and its associated risks for Black women. As one of the most effective ways to publicize important health-related information is through the media, assessing coverage and framing is essential […]
- by Cristiana Vale PiresCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. In October 2021, a growing number of women denounced needle spiking occurrences in the United Kingdom. The scientific evidence demonstrates the reduced prevalence of spiking and the difficulties in proving its incidence. However, when communicating spiking stories, the media tends to reproduce harmful rape myths. By using English-written online media as sources, this study aimed to analyze and describe needle spiking stories as gendered discourses that act as sexual terrorism in post-pandemic nightlife. The author performed a web-based search through Google News to collect the data and used the feminist critical discourse framework to […]
- by Edward LW GreenCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
- by Katharina MaierCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. In 2018–2019, there was a surge of local news media coverage in Winnipeg, Canada about what news media described as “brazen” liquor store theft. Online discussion and social media platforms provided segments of the public with opportunities to assert claims about the causes and consequences of this putative crime wave as well as potential solutions within and outside the penal system. These online fora allowed internet communities to imagine new methods of crime control and vocalize a range of emotions about crime and punishment. Employing a thematic analysis of reader comments across several online […]
- by Tara YoungCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This article explores the growing trend of using rap lyrics and music videos as evidence in criminal trials and considers the discriminatory implications of such practice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 43 police staff (officers and civillian investigators) and lawyers experienced in investigating, prosecuting or defending cases of serious violence, it focuses on instances where ‘joint enterprise’ (or secondary liability in criminal law) has been invoked to charge and prosecute groups of individuals. The findings reveal that despite legal safeguards designed to prevent prejudicial use of such evidence, its application persists in serious youth […]
- by Anna Di RoncoCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This article enriches and invigorates the green criminological scholarship concerned with nonhuman animals by proposing two research directions centred around the critical analysis of human control and ‘management’ of wild animals. While the first of these directions considers the control of animals in the city, the second draws on green cultural criminology to deconstruct and unravel cultural, mediated and political dynamics surrounding nonhuman animal ‘management’. The article concludes by contending that, following these lines of research, green criminologists can contribute to reducing human-animal conflicts in the city and beyond, while also offering new ways […]
- by Anita LamCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
- by Senthorun RajCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Asylum laws, policies, and bureaucracies are structured by spatializing logics of emotion such as compassion, sympathy, fear, anxiety, and hostility. For lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) people who seek asylum, legal recognition as a refugee is contingent on the extent to which receiving states believe they are deserving of compassion and care. This materializes spatially through racialized legal and administrative cartographies of safety and danger that position LGBTIQ people as being at risk of a “well-founded fear” of persecution. Meanwhile, those LGBTIQ people who seek asylum in a “disorderly” manner or […]
- by Ekaterina GulinaCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This article explores Russian young adults’s motives for consuming media content related to serial killers. Based on a sociological perspective of consumption, the research integrates concepts such as consumerism and “new hedonism” postulated by Campbell with Giddens’s structuration theory and Goffman’s stigma theory. We argue that consumerists’ motivations and images of serial killers are products of modernity. A total of 26 semi-structured online interviews were conducted with young adults aged 18–35 years from 14 cities in Russia. We then performed a thematic qualitative analysis using the AtlasTI software. Our findings show that consumers of […]
- by Alex SimpsonCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. By exploring the hauntological dimensions of fear of crime, this article proposes that this phenomenon exists as an ontological absence that manifests through the spectacle of crime’s imaginary, shaping thoughts, emotions, and movements. In so doing, we highlight fear of crime’s alignment with Fisher’s concept of the eerie – a presence that at once indicates an absence and an object that points to nothing beyond itself. Building on this foundation, we incorporate Simmel’s rendering of the Stranger and Casey’s theorization of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ places to argue that fear of crime is not solely […]
- by Judah ScheptCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
- by Arden Richards-KaramarkovichCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. In this research note, we advocate for greater use of a largely untapped form of archival data—prison cartoons. Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune, an American prison newspaper published in the 1960s and 1970s, we highlight how incarcerated artists used satirical humor to convey the harms of imprisonment and express their agency in the face of penal oppression. […]
- by Tony JeffersonCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
- by Jordana SilversteinCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
- by Tony KarasCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This article draws together existing criminological work as well as developments from sociology, political science and media studies to argue that cultural criminology can offer a useful corrective to current ‘counter-extremist’ thinking about the contemporary far right. The first part of the article introduces the contemporary far right, describes how it differs from previous instances, and explains that this resurgent far-right movement has to date primarily been analysed through the lens of ‘counter-extremism’. The second part of the article problematises the concepts of ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’. The article argues that these concepts are […]
- by Katinka van de VenCrime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. As anabolic-androgenic steroid use has become more mainstream, so has media reporting on steroid-related problems and harms. The media is a particularly important site in shaping the social meanings of alcohol and other drug use, yet no research to date has focused on media representations of steroids and their effects. Informed by Bacchi’s post-structural method of problematisation analysis, we examine how the Australian news media problematises steroids and significant political effects produced by dominant problematisations. Australian news articles from 37 sources were electronically collected via the Factiva database during 2022, with 151 articles included […]