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Crime, Media, Culture

Journal Description

Crime, Media, Culture

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

  • Techno-digital policing and speculative fictions: Towards a criminology of the future
    by Elaine Campbell
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This paper argues for a criminology of the future. This matters at a time when the accelerating use of technologically-supported and digitally enhanced (techno-digital) policing methods outpaces our ability to take stock of their social and criminal justice effects. Criminology and policing studies have been swift to address the organisational and operational complexities of techno-digital transformations, and have raised critical questions of the politico-ethical implications of this qualitatively different paradigm of policing. However, this scholarship remains marginal to, and is eclipsed by futures-facing technoscientific research agendas which continually bring the future into being through […]
  • Book Review: Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India
    by Sukanya Bhattacharya
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • The Great Resignation
    by Avi Brisman
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Skateboard crime and the pirating of urban space
    by Brian Glenney
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This paper seeks to analyze “skate crime:” what skateboarders do, why they do it, and why it is criminalized even in public spaces. I begin with a case example of the Dolores Street Hill Bomb in San Francisco, a seemingly over-criminalized annual event that treats skaters as enemies of the city, a logic of enmity. This same logic was used to criminalize 17th–18th century “Golden Age” maritime piracy, a heuristic that helps assess the role that stigmatization by dominant orders of authority plays in skate crime. I deepen this narrative of skate crime by […]
  • Seduction of far-right actions: A pathway to an authentic self?
    by Yutaka Yoshida
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Far-right civil movements have emerged as a significant predicament in numerous regions worldwide. Despite abundant research on the tactics employed by far-right groups to instil ideologies, behaviours and sentiments in their followers, such as street demonstrations, investigations into the meaning-making of far-right actions in relation to the trajectories of the participants’ lives remain scarce. The present study uses the analytical tool proposed by Katz to explore how far-right activists obtain a sense of moral transcendence through their activism, including participating in the liminal moments of far-right rallies, revelling in unrestricted speech, discovering new abilities, […]
  • “Little wars with the police”: Aesthetic arsenals and intellects of insult
    by Tyler Wall
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This paper describes the contemporary entanglement of “fuck the police” (FTP) and “all cops are bastards” (ACAB), locating each as examples of a growing rejection of an immiserating police power. We argue that these confrontational phrases emerge from the policed classes as relatively precise political diagnoses of a police power that is elementally concerned with the fabrication of capital’s social, racial, economic, and aesthetic order(s). In our view, the anti-police vitality communicated in these and other crude, combative, and dismissive symbolic confrontations with police is part of the necessary conditions for the revolutionary pursuit […]
  • Film review: The Forever Purge
    by João Raphael da Silva
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Community-oriented copaganda: Anti-Black violence in a visual archive of policing
    by Amanda M Petersen
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Like legitimacy crises of the past, recent high-profile murders of Black individuals by the police have led to renewed crises of police legitimacy. As a response to both the racialized violence and the subsequent legitimacy crisis, community-oriented policing is once again being heralded as a bi-partisan solution to the problem. In this article, I situate such a solution as in alignment with, rather than a departure from, racist police violence. I do this by conducting a visual analysis of a federal archive of photographs said to represent community-oriented policing asking what the images reveal […]
  • Reflecting on Gray Cavender
    by David L. Altheide
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Citizen empowerment as a police force multiplier: Reproducing social domination through a 21st century personal safety app
    by Justin Turner
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Citizen is a digital mapping platform and personal safety app that boasts over 10 million users in the United States. Through the platform, users can report crimes, map safe routes, or rely on the app’s other functions to protect themselves from dangerous situations. Sold on a promise of empowerment, Citizen markets itself as a 21st century technology capable of repairing the ills of our social world. In this article we analyze how Citizen taps into the desire for control and safety and urges its users to actively protect their own communities. As such, we […]
  • Book review: Tracks and Traces: Exploring the World of Graffiti Writing through Visual Methods
    by Jeffrey Ian Ross
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Documenting prison therapy: Insider audience perspectives on The Work (2017)
    by Jamie Bennett
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This article is an audience ethnography, focusing on the documentary The Work (dir Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous, US, 2017), which depicts a four-day therapeutic programme involving men from the community and men from a high security prison. The film was screened to audiences of people who live and work in an English prison-based therapeutic community. Previous prison-based audience studies have highlighted the significance of the media text and the characteristics and experiences of the audience, but have not specifically addressed the salience of the context in which the media is consumed. By conducting […]
  • The Clansman, the Lynchings, and Enduring Racial Violence in Performance
    by David Ollington
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Performance can incite conflict. An artist may depict a demagogue as a martyr, ridicule a group of people, or justify violence. Viewers and audience members variantly interpret these creative expressions. In the early 20th Century, an enormously popular play, The Clansman, toured the United States, opened on Broadway in the spring of 1906, and instigated violence. The play by white supremacist Thomas Dixon (1864-1946) portrayed a dystopian and racist view of American Reconstruction in which the Ku Klux Klan heroically saves the day. In March of 1906, the original company of actors performed The […]
  • “A vision of the possible”: The life and works of gray cavender
    by Francine Banner
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This essay is a tribute to the life and career of Dr. Gray Cavender.
  • Information security for criminological ethnographers
    by Theo Kindynis
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Information security refers to ‘the practice of defending information from unauthorised access’. Information security practices include everyday activities such as protecting your bank details, or keeping your workplace logins secure. Despite increasingly restrictive approaches to research ethics, academia continues to lag behind journalism when it comes to best practice with regards to information security. This article discusses information security as it pertains to qualitative and especially ethnographic research into crime and deviance. In doing so, the article addresses a gap in the methodological literature by drawing on lessons and real-world examples from journalism, academia […]
  • Review Essay: An Aesthetic of Disorientation: Impressions of Crisis and Distance in the TV Show Goliath
    by David Beer
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Book review: Fieldnotes on a Study of Young People’s Perceptions of Crime and Justice
    by Marijke Van Buggenhout
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • The guillotine: Shadow, spectacle and the terror
    by Eamonn Carrabine
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Of all the images generated by the French Revolution it is the guillotine that is the most notorious. From the beginning the apparatus constituted an elaborate visual spectacle, one that not only efficiently dispensed justice but also offered up a form of popular entertainment and ritualised collective vengeance. The paper seeks to shed fresh light on one of the most perplexing mysteries of the revolutionary era. How did enlightened individuals who had helped create the most democratic and egalitarian society yet seen in the world, descend into a totalitarian regime in which many thousands […]
  • Book review: Abolish Criminology
    by Kaitlyn J. Selman
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Crime media as cinematic “freak show”: Ableism and speciesism in retelling Dahmer
    by Ronald Kramer
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Grounded in an analysis of the Netflix series Dahmer-Monster, this article offers a theory concerning mass consumption of crime drama. Refracted by scholarship on ableism and speciesism, I argue that Dahmer-Monster (and comparable shows) can be understood as mediated “freak show.” Crime drama offers images of “abnormality” that provide a surface upon which conceptions of normalcy can be (re)inscribed. Audiences are assured of their normality via this process. The article speaks to critical criminologists and critical disability studies scholarship. Consistent with nascent “crip criminology,” it suggests that there is much scope for further dialogue […]