ABSTRACT
Video ethnography offers the discipline of criminology a rich opportunity to portray the sensory experiences of crime. This chapter introduces three video ethnography techniques – immediacy and cinematic verstehen, media immersion, and narrative criminology – that can help researchers rethink criminology within a documentary framework. It demonstrates how documentary criminology embraces these three techniques with one case study: Kamp Katrina – a criminological, embodied, estranging, and often disturbing sensory documentary that embraces ambiguity and the aesthetics of place and sound to activate sense attention. The methodological framework outlined in the chapter encourages criminologists to implement video methods to engage lived experiences and craft narratives as sensory scholarship. Immediacy and cinematic verstehen, media immersion, and narrative criminology are valuable methodological techniques that can help criminologists reimagine the research process. Where experiential knowledge intersects with documentary filmmaking and ethnography, there is the potential to dramatically engage popular audiences with criminological research.
