ABSTRACT

We are, as Jock Young (2004:13) poignantly remarks, ‘confronted at this moment with an orthodox criminology which is denatured and desiccated’, a criminology, moreover, that is reductive and uncritical as it treats social categories as variables to be controlled for and ‘events’ as fixed ‘facts’ to be explained. Sharply critical of normative methodologies and the underlying belief that ‘truth’ is to be found in aggregate data, cultural criminology has been vociferous in its articulation that crime and its control should be approached as ‘cultural enterprises’.