ABSTRACT
Cultural criminology is concerned with the convergence of cultural, criminal and crime control processes; as such, it situates criminality and its control in the context of cultural dynamics and the contested production of meaning. When cultural criminology first emerged as a distinct criminological perspective in the mid-1990s, it did so by synthesizing and revitalizing two lines of criminological thought, one North American, the other British. The crimes and controls of late modernity engage with its larger dynamics, amplifying them in some moments, altering and undermining them in others. Cultural criminology's focus on the situated ephemerality of crime's seductions, and the immediacies of risk and skill that animate edgework, have in turn led to a reimagining of methodology. Cultural criminology endeavours to develop new criminological models and criminological critiques that can converse with late modern culture at large, and that can account for the complex cultural interplay of crime, crime control and representation.
