ABSTRACT
Documentary criminology is the practice of using audiovisual methods to interpretively craft lived experience as media; it riffs on and extends cultural criminology's exploration of the situated meaning of experiential crimes and transgressions in their wider context by producing experiences in the form of a documentary. This chapter demonstrates how today's methodological climate in criminology is ripe for a shift toward the dissemination of audiovisual knowledge via the form and practice of documentary filmmaking. It introduces the criminological audience to some of the core concepts and typologies that underpin traditional forms of documentary filmmaking. The chapter outlines the close relationship that already exists between cultural and documentary criminology. The concept of ethnographic verstehen is a central one across both cultural and documentary criminology. The chapter concludes that, for all its focus on audiovisual matters, documentary criminology is not intended to stand in binary opposition to more traditional written or textual forms of criminology.
