ABSTRACT
The past two decades have seen the development of two new types of criminological analysis: green criminology and cultural criminology. Both remain emergent perspectives, still in the process of sharpening their theoretical and substantive focus – though in the case of cultural criminology at least, this inchoate state is itself valued for its anarchic and inclusionary dynamics, for keeping cultural criminology “a loose federation of outlaw intellectual critiques” (Ferrell 2007: 99). Even in this emergent stage, though, particular orientations can be indentified – orientations that create some potentially fertile ground for the intertwined growth of green criminology and cultural criminology. By the nature of their subject matter, both green criminology and cultural criminology push against the conventional boundaries of criminology, and so tend to upset the definitional and epistemic order of the discipline. Likewise, both are open to exploring a range of social harms and social consequences, whether these harms are conventionally defined as “criminal,” currently left outside the orbit of law and criminality, or even themselves propagated by the criminalization process. At their best, both link their overt substantive concern – environmental harm in the case of green criminology, meaning and representation in the case of cultural criminology – with broader issues of power and inequality. And certainly both attempt to situate their subject matter historically, both in terms of its long-range development and its current residency within the crisis of late modernity and late capitalism.
