ABSTRACT
Both postmodernism and post-structuralism present a critical challenge to modernism and articulate critiques of the assumptions and frameworks that shaped modern criminology. From a postmodernist perspective, meanings, contexts, influences, intentions all differ from person to person and place to place. In terms of implications for the criminological field, this challenge to the search for certainties is not new, and in many ways echoes elements of symbolic interactionism and labelling perspectives as well as social constructionism and chaos theory. Postmodernism suggests that the search for explanatory causes is a way of subscribing to belief in grand meta-narratives that no longer stand as credible. Postmodernism challenges the 'absolute truths' purportedly achieved through science, and postmodern criminologists call into question modernist faith in the availability of explanations for, and solutions to, crime. 'Constitutive criminology', as promulgated by Henry and Milovanovic, seeks to articulate a version of a postmodern criminology animated by different notions of 'crime', 'offender', 'victim' and 'control'.
