ABSTRACT
Post-structuralism (PS) exists as a loose collection of anti-foundational theories and anti-essentialist methods that interrogate forms of thinking and destabilize ways of knowing. A number of critical theorists and social philosophers are generally understood to be aligned with PS or otherwise responsible for its intellectual development. Luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan have been particularly influential within criminology and legal studies. Recent works from scholars such as Arrigo and Milovanovic, as well as Crewe and Lippens, have drawn attention to the intersections of PS, postmodernism and criminology, emphasizing the importance of pursuing academic border-crossing that develops and integrates the epistemological and ontological contributions of constitutive, psychoanalytic semiotic, complexity/non-linear systems theorizing and related forms of sociocultural critique and heterodoxy. Drawing inspiration from Gilles Deleuze, often in collaboration with Felix Guattari, post-structural criminology has called for a vision of ontology that is in process, dynamic, local, contingent and open to change.
