ABSTRACT
Building from a variety of theoretical trajectories in criminology and related disciplines, cultural criminology has emerged over the past decade or so as an orientation designed to engage specifically and directly with the cultural dimensions of crime and crime control. In its engagement with these various dimensions, cultural criminology emphasizes the essential role of meaning, image, and representation in shaping the reality of crime and the range of collective responses to it. It draws on semiotic analysis, and the sensibilities of deconstruction and postmodernism, as it increasingly focuses on images that reference "real" events less than they emerge out of self-reverential media practices, and in turn loop endlessly through criminal subcultures and agencies of social control. Significantly, cultural criminology proposes considerably more for criminology than a broader focus attuned to media dynamics and the cultural practices of criminals; it also proposes new analytic orientations that in many ways directly confront the conventional methodological, theoretical, and philosophic foundations of criminology itself.
