ABSTRACT
In anticipation of the dawn of the twenty-first century, David Garland and Richard Sparks (2000) set out a programmatic research agenda that would re-conceptualize the discipline of criminology. They argue that academic criminology no longer monopolizes contemporary criminological discourse in society. Instead, this discourse can now be found circulating in public policy and popular culture often with little reference to or understanding of academic criminology. While academic criminology has historically focused on how public policy has constituted the issues of crime and crime control, it has generally ignored popular culture’s criminological discourse. However, Garland and Sparks note that if academic criminology is to remain relevant today, it needs to understand the terms in which crime and crime control are being debated and discussed in popular culture. In seeking continued relevance, criminologists have embraced cultural studies in order to examine pop culture (Garland 2006). Pop culture is primarily conceptualized as the contex-tual domain of images, representations and meanings, many of which are mass-mediated. However, this enthusiastic embrace has generally occurred without much critical contemplation of exactly what it means to study culture (Garland 2006), particularly the production of mass-mediated, cultural representations. For the most part, this lack of critical reflection can be read as another instantiation of the observation that criminology has occurred largely in ignorance of recent conceptual debates in cultural studies (Carrabine 2008: 44) and in media studies (Sparks 1992). As a result, criminologists have tended to write as though there exists a singular culture industry (also known as the media) that is similarly responsible for all kinds of cultural product, all of which are presumed to generate negative effects on mass audiences regardless of medium.
