ABSTRACT
Dead bodies are a fact of fatal violence. Despite the tragic reality that crime often produces dead bodies, this chapter argues that criminology has barely wrestled with the emotional, social, political, economic and crimino-legal quandaries around the dead. Increasingly, those bodies are on public view. The shifting dynamics of media in the digital age expose diverse and proliferating instances of the dead’s visibility, including the live-streaming of fatal events on social media, the museological exhumation of evidential archives, the forensic aesthetics of artists, and the affective productions of true crime podcasts. While emerging debates in criminology reveal the problematic dimensions of representing death in the contemporary era, and rightly signal the importance of concepts such as empathy, emotion, trauma, and ethics, this chapter will argue that the challenge for criminology is not just a question of the dead’s increasing visibility, but also to recognise the foundational work that the dead perform for criminological thinking and the emotions thereby provoked; that is, how the dead body matters for criminology. It argues that, even though criminology is saturated in crime’s emotional life, it still has not contended with the dead as one of its sovereign subjects. Nonetheless, the dead haunt criminological thought with a type of fervent agency; their presence as a tragic and terrible fact of crime exerts considerable pressure and motivates emotional labour: defining research encounters, affecting policy, and contouring our understandings of both justice and injustice. This chapter surveys the various ways that the dead assume meaning in and for criminology through a range of representations: bereavement needs, sensitive images, survivors’ testimonies, victims’ rights, to ask, what debt does criminology owe to the dead? In what ways does criminology care for the dead? And, importantly, how have the dead inflamed and secured criminological knowledge?
