Cultural Criminology: Mapping a Meaning-Oriented Approach for the Criminological Imagination

Summary

Cultural criminology is a subfield that emerged in the early to mid-1990s. It remains a vibrant field, one that continues attracting scholars interested in developing it further. It offers ways of studying criminalization, deviance, victimization, social control, and punishment that, relative to mainstream forms of criminology, are alternative and critical. Very much inspired by critical and interpretive sociologies of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, cultural criminology understands the staple concerns of criminological theory—crime, social control, and punishment—as transpiring within meaningful, culturally oriented worlds. For cultural criminology, theories will remain incomplete if they continue to ignore the ways in which criminologically relevant practices occur in contexts of meaning and power, and how such practices are meaningful to participants. Cultural criminology can be regarded as inclined toward rich, qualitative methods such as ethnography and textual analysis. The methods and problems that occupy cultural criminology are, however, diverse and continue to expand.