ABSTRACT
This chapter considers cultural criminology as a key approach to studying crime and culture with an emphasis on crime-media relations. It considers the ‘politics’ of cultural criminology and its relationship to orthodox perspectives, its interdisciplinary influences as well as its antecedents in mainstream criminology and the sociology of deviance, including British cultural studies, American subcultural theory, labeling theory and symbolic interactionism, and the Chicago School of Sociology. While those influences remain evident, cultural criminology has gradually developed a distinctive theoretical focus and methodological approach, eschewing quantitative techniques and the use of statistics in favor of qualitative methods that seek to understand the situated and existential dynamics of criminal acts and transgressive behavior via techniques like ethnographic fieldwork. The final parts of the chapter consider the significance of trying to interpret the meaning of crime by analyzing visual imagery and storytelling under the banners of what have become two separate, though sometimes related areas of study: visual criminology and narrative criminology.
