ABSTRACT
Introduction In the small space available to me, I want to take the reader on an intellectual journey that covers the key theoretical shifts in my transformation, over a 30-year period, from postgraduate student at the (now closed) Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the early 1970s to Professor of Criminology at Keele University writing about psychosocial criminology. My hope is that this will act both as a reminder to students of cultural criminology of some of the intellectual roots of contemporary thinking about culture, and as an argument justifying the taking of my particular psychosocial route. In broad terms, my journey started out focused on the relations between culture and structure and has ended up exploring the connections between the psyche and discourse. Initially, the complexities of the social world dominated; latterly, the complexities of the psyche. Interest in the determinacy of structural relations has been replaced by an engagement with the historical contingencies of changing discursive formations, the logic of correspondence replaced by the disjunctive logic of psychoanalysis. Power, now seen as dislodged from structure, has become an omnipresent and relational phenomenon (which does not mean simply an interactional phenomenon); and class as the key focus has been eclipsed by an interest in gender. The transitional hinge coupling these shifts has been an approach to mediations, originally influenced by structural linguistics, which breaks with the transparency of ‘mediation as representation’ in favour of a constitutive model where mediations produce their own effects.
